Posted on 09/11/2004 7:35:22 AM PDT by yatros from flatwater
THE CLINTONS WERE OUR FIRST PoMo PRESIDENCY, and their legacy is an increasingly Post-Modernist, Deconstructed America in which fact and fiction, truth and lie, honesty and dishonesty, right and wrong, good and evil are deliberately fuzzed, blurred and rendered irrelevant.
In truth, one of the only three statements for which President Bill Clinton will be remembered in the books of quotations is his lawyerly sophism: “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
Without ever giving the Clintons their due for this cultural and moral vandalism, the Arts and Culture Critic of the San Francisco Chronicle recently celebrated an America in which black-and-white moral, ethical and aesthetic distinctions have faded to gray.
“This, after all, is a culture that has come to accept and even expect skewed information at best, outright lies at worst, in everything from government to advertising to art,” wrote Steven Winn. “A generation after Watergate and Vietnam, scandals that made truth a casualty have lost their power to scandalize. We live in a society of widespread duplicity and deceit.”
Hillary Clinton’s new book, which sells fiction and half-truths as non-fiction, is a case in point. But evidence now suggests that even the marketing of her book entails Clintonesque dishonesty.
In an internal memo at her publisher Simon & Schuster, reports The American Prowler, one editor describes the mysterious leak of some of the book’s most sensational passages: “That was really to jump-start the sales. It’s a tried and true technique.”
Trouble is, Time Magazine had paid a fortune for exclusive first rights to publish such Hillary excerpts, expecting this to boost its newsstand sales. According to Matt Drudge, Time editors debated whether to scrap its planned Hillary cover and excerpts after the Associated Press did a wire story quoting the book’s hottest tidbits.
Associated Press was in turn accused of violating Hillary Clinton’s copyright in the Wall Street Journal. AP competitor Reuters did a story about how the Associated Press had “spoiled” the promotion of Hillary’s book by giving away the choicest filet of the book to readers for free.
But if Simon & Schuster itself leaked the excerpts, as the Prowler’s reported memo comes close to saying, then Hillary and/or her publisher gave away to AP an exclusive right that had already been sold to Time Magazine. I am not a lawyer, but to me this looks suspiciously similar to civil and/or criminal fraud.
Not illegal but certainly dishonest is additional information obtained from “deep inside the mighty publishing house” by former literary agent and now the brains behind Lucianne.com, Lucianne Goldberg.
“No way would we publish a million copies of anything,” this executive told her about what this publishing house was telling the press. “It’s only necessary to say we did. Besides, where would we put them?” Simon & Schuster had told reporters that the giant printing of Hillary’s book was safeguarded in a secret “warehouse in New Jersey.”
Did Hillary’s book sell 200,000 copies on its first day of publication? “There is no possible way for us to know that,” the executive told Lucianne. But Simon & Schuster told reporters that Hillary had shattered the one-day record for such book sales.
According to the internal memo obtained by the Prowler, Hillary’s fans – like those going to the opening of a blockbuster movie – have gotten their copies of her book and will not be buying more. She needs to sell at least two million hardback copies to justify the $8 million promised. Even if all the hype is true, Hillary over the next three months of promotion tour and diminishing sales must try to climb the remaining 90 percent of the mountain, to sell another 1.8 million hardcover books.
“Deception is so pervasive today it almost feels authentic to us,” writes Winn. “Lies, from the skillfully subtle to the blatantly stage-managed, flow around us all the time. We co-opt them by going along and trying to unpack the deeper truths inside.”
“Unpack” is one of those vague magical words of Deconstructionism. The ancient Greeks called it Sophistry, a use of philosophical word-bending whose practitioners are able to argue convincingly that up is down, left is right, white is black as adroitly as any wizard of double talk in the Bureaucracy of Historical Revisionism in George Orwell University, (founded 1984).
At the heart of such thinking is the assumption that no objective truth exists. Every statement or belief by everybody is the product of cultural, political, racial and other prejudices. Any statement can be “deconstructed” or “unpacked” to expose these biases and thereby invalidate the statement.
By such lights, Hillary and Bill Clinton cannot be called liars because nobody else has a superior position of objective truth from which to judge them. It’s pseudo-Einsteinian relativity, transported from physics to the realms of culture, morality and politics.
(Oddly, however, these Post-Modernists usually hold two kinds of thinking exempt from being challenged by deconstruction – Marxist Political Correctness, and Post-Modernism.)
“Perhaps, in a postmodern world that is increasingly comfortable with irony, ambiguity, relativism and doubt,” wrote Winn, “we simply no longer believe it’s possible to distinguish fiction definitively from fact, lies from truth.” Hey, that has been true in the better-living-through-chemistry Duchy of San Francisco since the 1960s.
The perfect embodiment of such moral relativism is Bill Clinton’s twisting, under oath, of what “the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Close behind are the “Matrix” movies about people living in a virtual reality generated by a ruling computer.
“’Matrix’ madness, in all its giddy science fiction exurberance,” wrote Winn, “reflects a genuine uncertainty about the verifiable meaning of almost anything.”
But if nothing can be believed, then nothing can be valued, fought for, died for. And as the movie “The Matrix” itself taught, the body cannot live without the mind. If you believe in the voodoo illusion that you just plunged to your death from atop a burning World Trade Center tower, that belief in the computer-generated illusion will kill you.
(Congress agrees. It recently outlawed possession of pornography based entirely on fiction, on images generated entirely inside computers.)
Likewise, a society that ceases to believe it has anything to live for will weaken, lose its will, and die. And this apparently is the real aim of those on university campuses and politics who promote Post-Modernism and Deconstructionism.
“Each new revelation – whether it’s insider trading, the pedophilia cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church, the bald-faced lies of tobacco company executives under oath or the latest cases of plagiarism by some respected scholar – only confirms a cynical view,” wrote Winn, “that nothing can be taken as reliable or valid.”
But the goal of Leftists such as Bill and Hillary Clinton is to “deconstruct” the West, capitalism, private property, individualism, and any system of belief such as religion that might impede the transfer of total power over all things and people to the government. To achieve this in a morally disarmed society, they need not propose or win support for alternatives. All they need to do is tear our old-fashioned values, institutions and rights down.
“All art, in a sense, is a lie,” wrote Winn, “a complex fabrication of illusions, symbols and signifiers that creates an alternate reality. For centuries before the notion of authorship and individual creation took hold, that enterprise was a collective one. Artists told each other’s stories, completed paintings sketched by a master or mimicked another musician’s tunes.”
Yes, and Hillary had four ghost writers produce the book for which she now grabs the credit and money. But it is a work of art, or more accurately of artifice. Hillary gives us not veracity but verisimilitude, the illusion of a politically correct world in which “it takes a village to raise a child” and “if [convicted cop killer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson] Mandela can forgive, I can.”
“This is not a pipe,” wrote surrealist artist Rene Magritte at the bottom of his most famous painting. Why? Because above the words was not a pipe but his depiction of a pipe. A picture of something is not the thing itself. This proto-existential insight became inspiration for a book by one of the founding fathers of Post-Modern thought, philosopher Michel Foucault.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are neither saints nor martyrs nor even minimally decent or honorable human beings . . . despite leftist media efforts to depict them as such. They are not a pipe.
No wonder that a recent survey by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that the belief that “most people can be trusted” – shared by 53 percent of Americans in 1964 – is today in the wake of eight years of Clinton rule, hypocrisy, and dishonesty a view shared by only 35 percent of us.
The Clinton legacy has been the deconstruction of our trust in government, business, our media watchdogs and one another. They have also destroyed one of America’s two major political parties, with former Democratic National Committee co-chair Steve Grossman proclaiming Bill Clinton “the most moral politician I have ever known.”
In Grossman’s deconstruction of reality, all that matters is “public morality,” i.e., did a politician advance the cause of socialism. Bill Clinton did so. His “personal morality” – whether he lied, cheated, stole, transferred U.S. missile secrets to Communist China in exchange for millions in cash, or demanded the sacrifice of an occasional virgin to his predatory lusts – is entirely irrelevant in this Democratic Party hierarchy of leftist values.
In an earlier era the notion that a politician could be personally filthy and corrupt but publicly virtuous and an exemplar for our children would have seemed absurd.
But America has been changed by the Clintons, perhaps forever. Millions of us now live in a post-truth, post-virtue, whatever-obtains society in which all that matters is whether something feels good and, by hook or crook, gains power. Might makes right. Winning trumps fair play and all other past virtues.
And millions of our children now hear the Clinton message: “Don’t be suckers and play by the rules. Look at us. We broke every old rule of decency, and we’re winners. We’re millionaires. We’re celebrities. Cheating pays. Be like us.” This is the corrosive Clinton legacy, and unless repudiated it will deconstruct and demolish America.
Dan Rather lied, while truth died.
This is a good article. Well worth reading.
There will be considerable traction, as people see the Democrats and the media will do anything to get Bush out of office. To them, the end justifies the means. All they want is power, and will stop at nothing to get it. I believe that is patently obvious to the 'man on the street'. Votes will go in the opposite direction.
Funny, I was just complaining about this last night!
---I am so tired of seeing these people round the corners off every fact!---
“In the latter days, even the elect shall be deceived…”
P.S. See how easy it will be for Hillary to get elected president?!
If the word gets out to the 'man on the street' and they are motivated to respond, it may get traction. But the MSM will not be swayed, and as George Barna's surveys point out, even "Evangelicals", who should understand and care about objective truth, don't. Sadly, there are too many who rejoice in calling good evil and vice versa, even among "conservatives".
Thanks.
FMCDH(BITS)
Excellent post. In Los Angeles I endlessly hear acquaintances say "That's your truth," as if facts were matters of opinion.
I lament the erosion of "Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
I've been dealing with postmodernism for the past twenty or thirty years.
Actually, there's no such thing. A better word for it would be "late decadent modernism." Decadence, nihilism, and the pursuit of empty pleasures--with disregard for any of the higher virtues and ideals--are the drivers of this empty pretence of a philosophy.
Good article, although I would quarrel with one point: "(Congress agrees. It recently outlawed possession of pornography based entirely on fiction, on images generated entirely inside computers.)"
No, congress didn't pass that law because they imagined that virtual reality was the same as real reality, or because they mistook fiction for fact. They passed it because they knew that fictional pornography has been proven many times over to influence people to do bad things in real life. They didn't want cartoon pedophilia because it would inevitably seduce people to commit real pedophilia. The courts, of course, could not understand this.
read later
Possibly irrelevant, but Harry Potter delivered upwards of four million copies on the first day, not once, but twice.
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