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Scheherazade Does D.C.: A Thousand and One Tales of Spin
Scheherazade in the White House
by Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002.
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
George Bush’s war administration used a magician, Hollywood
designers, and Karl Rove -- presenting 1,001 stories to sell the
invasion of Iraq. And Rove kept the distracting images of John
Wayne-like morality tales spinning to help the American public avoid
seeing the disaster in Iraq.
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an
intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase
“reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had
nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page
dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New
York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of
the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered
at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah,
right…’)."
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl
Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and
Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than
from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the
ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists
against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against
warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against
supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the
relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s
superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from
realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of
appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the rescue
The
US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration
of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon
departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in
1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As
well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed
services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at
US forces headquarters in Qatar: For a million dollars, a storage
hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with
stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to
produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A
scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed
journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked
for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and the television programme Good
Morning America. In 2001, the White House had put him in charge of
creating background designs for presidential speeches -- unsurprising
to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More
surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for
interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and
for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without
food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to
Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising
by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels. It is not
known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it
seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott
Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican
propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made
important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003, he
stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft
carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat
operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States
and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there.
Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on
it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving
the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he
were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon
operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on
the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre
critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and
said it was fantastic -- like theatre. David Broder of The Washington
Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture. Sforza
had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about
60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to
be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was
never as explicit as on 15 August 2002, when Bush solemnly spoke of
national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the
faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and
Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle
that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to
those of his predecessors.
The image becomes the story
For
Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US
public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle
that tests our strength and even more our resolve,” Sforza rented three
barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he
had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue
appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on
this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s
declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in
the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was
around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself.
What
is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission
accomplished,” the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty -- over time
the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the
viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the
image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the
desired emotion. For Americans in 2002, nothing could have had a
greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary
of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was
ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira
Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the
“Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories
-- stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or,
in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country)
forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of
Americans who feel that their lives are out of control." Rove did this
with much success in 2004, when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’
attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great
collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains,
Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John
Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier -- at least
enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might
otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.”
Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil
stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election
into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus
Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam,
built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no
matter what’s actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants
every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement." This August,
Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced
his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his
work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.” -- translated by
Morag Young
Christian Salmon is the author of Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires, La Découverte, Paris, 2007.
Agence
Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark
Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong,Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and
Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Released: 24 December 2007
Word Count: 1,433
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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