DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Kenny Ausubel of AlterNet predicted the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election 13 months in advance:

This Is Your Brain on Public Relations

Part of the problem is that human beings seem to be hardwired for fraud.

George Lakoff, an author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who calls himself a “cognitive activist,” says this: “One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures. The frames are in the synapses of our brains — physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”

In other words, forget winning on the facts or the science. It’s all about the story. And once stories take hold, they’re hard to dislodge.

The article is about greenscamming. That’s a word I have yet to hear in the mainstream media. But it’s like the Matrix; it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television… Or, to put it another way, “You think that’s Clean Air you’re breathing?”

Survey after survey shows that Americans care deeply about the environment and are even willing to shell out money to take good care of it. So duping innocent people into harming the environment requires an occult technology of trickery.

The head sorcerer hired by the GOP to provide guidance on fooling voters into doing something they don’t want to do is a guy named Frank Luntz. I’d gloat that Luntz’ report leaked to the press, except that it didn’t matter. In the terms of cognitive science, it was an apparently inconvenient fact.

But if you’re interested, read a summary at the AlterNet article (above) or the whole report at the LCV’s Bush Administration Rollbacks site.

Journalist Bill Moyers recently received the Global Environment Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School. His acceptance speech is devastating. I couldn’t read it straight through; my dinner started to back up on me.

Bill Moyers on Health and the Global Environment

Moyers was establishing a connection between religious fundamentalism and the destruction of the environment. It seems counter-intuitive that someone claiming respect and awe for all God’s creation would willingly participate in the systematic trashing of same. But that’s Moyer’s case, and he delivers.

James Watt, President Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior … told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

I’m strugging to accept that nutjobs like that can achieve high office. George W. Bush, I’m looking at you.

A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks… you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist [magazine] puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”

Here’s the ultimate irony: the United States was founded by people who left their home country to escape religious persecution. Now I’m considering leaving the United States for the same damn reason.

Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — our correspondent asked: Where should environmentalists put their energies for the next four years?

It’s a good question, and I’m grateful to Grist Magazine for asking it.

Open letter to moveon.org:
Four years of work, multiple emails per day to supporters, dozens of print and television commercials created, and tens of millions of dollars spent, and this is the best you can do?

Open letter to John Kerry:
Just when I was getting ready to give up hope, you gave it up for me. Thanks a bunch.

Open letter to George W. Bush:
I must have missed whatever your party has been slipping into the water supply. Where do I go to become happy and docile and self-satisfied? Also, please send me one of those nifty Orange Alert signs so I can be ever-watchful in my own home of possible terrorist activity. PS. All that stuff about global warming is just hokum.

I used to consider myself apolitical. I was Republican by default, having been raised in a household where the word “Democrat” was frequently heard at dinner, immediately following the word “goddamn!” But I had an aversion to news. I didn’t educate myself about issues, and I felt strongly apathetic about the political process. I voted in the big elections, but only because that gave me the right to complain later.

George W. Bush changed all that. The past four years have provided a crash course in the danger of apathy.

For that, and only that, I thank President Bush. He made me realise what I care about. I have watched, and to a tiny degree documented the assaults on the environment by this administration, and I realized that what strikes me as common sense — “don’t poison yourself” — is remarkably uncommon in the White House.

I’ve paid a price for this education. To date, it’s cost me a sense of humor. And a couple hundred dollars in political contributions.

Last week, my senses hit overload. Whereas a few weeks ago I hung on every word, every fake smile, every grimace of the debates, now I can’t even bear to see a newspaper headline. I have pre-election anxiety. Every time someone mentions Diebold or Florida or the GOP, my stomach lurches. I feel like I’m sitting in the lobby of the oral surgeon’s office, waiting for my name to be called.

The Daily Show is getting lots of mileage from its Indecision 2004 joke. The Onion is running a piece on the Countdown to the Recount. Meanwhile, my stomach is doing (wait for it…) flip-flops.

I remember thinking, late in November 2000, that they should just give Bush the victory rather than dragging out the counterclaims. “It’s dangerous to not have a winner yet,” I thought, and “the rest of the world must think we’re incompetent. And anyway, how bad could he be?”