In an article posted on antiwar.com, Professor Ira Chernus makes an interesting point about how the Republicans manage to win elections despite the odds:
[Rove is] borrowing a page from an ancient Iranian storybook and imitating Scheherazade . . . [he] is telling Republican candidates to follow Scheherazade’s rule: 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.
Follow me over the edge as I tell you what the Republicans’ story is, and how Democrats can one-up it.
You can argue that things are not going well for the party of Rove. Republicans are being indicted faster than we can keep up, scandals dot the landscape, their legislative agenda is a joke, and on and on. So how do they cope? They tell a story every American knows: Cowboys and Indians.
Oh, it’s different from the Tom Mix movies of yore. The Indians live overseas these days, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but they still have brown skin and they still shoot at the cowboys — that is to say, us.
The story of America from the Anglo point of view is a compelling one. From time out of mind the good Christian Americans have found the need to expand into the territory of the savage heathen Redskin, who wasn’t using it for anything important anyway. What is the adventure in Iraq but a game of cowboys and Indians writ large, where it’s our job to create civilization in the midst of chaos and make good respectable citizens out God’s lesser children?
It’s a story that every American knows by heart. And the people the Republicans want to recruit see themselves as the cowboys, as the cavalry, as the civilizers who are going to tame this brave new world.
The Democrats need to counter with their own story. And as it happens, they have the perfect story. It’s just as American as the story of the frontier — maybe more so — and it also goes straight to the origins of this country and the people who live here.
It’s a story about a government that’s out of touch with the common man. A story about big business interests who see the country as a cash cow to be milked for all it’s worth.
Our story is about a group of patriots who dared to suggest that we don’t have to subject ourselves to tyrannical rule, by big business or by a unitary monarch. It’s about people who started forging the idea of liberty, of freedom, of being able to choose one’s own rulers. About people who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor toward throwing off the shackles that had been imposed on them. About men and women who fought and died for the idea of liberty.
We are the patriots. We are the ones fighting the Tories. Remember that only 40% or so of the population of the colonies supported the cause of American independence. By all accounts more than 50% of the American population is against the war in Iraq. Over 65% don’t approve of the way the alleged President is doing his job. The numbers grow every day.
The Republicans want us to be afraid of the terrorist bogey-men. I say, we should be afraid of the ruling elite and what they can do. The Republicans want to tell you stories about cowboys and Indians. I want to tell stories about Patrick Henry and George Washington and Samuel Adams and John Paul Jones.
And Cindy Sheehan and Pete Seeger and Boston Joe and Damnit Janet and everyone else who is putting their life, their fortune, their sacred honor, and everything else they have on the line to try to wrest control of our country from the madmen and crazy women who have taken it over.
And I want you to tell those stories, too.
I love this. It is so right on.
I’m glad you liked it.
I agree, Omir. I have been trying to tell that story without even knowing why.
It’s a good story. We should tell it more. If His Nibs can make weird noises about Dred Scott that only his followers and those who interpret them to the rest of us can understand, I figure we can tell stories about Crispus Attucks and Nathan Hale and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
So, what you are suggesting is that we tell a story about people who are shouting “No taxation without representation!” and lead a movement to defeat King George?! And we create heros who say things like “Give me liberty, or give me death” and “Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty.”
Sounds good to me.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
As you shared with me a while back
It’s easy to die for a cause and it’s so hard to live for one.
Each day we go out – is just another page to that story.
Give me liberty or give me death…. Let’s work towards liberty so that we may improve life.
there are no heroes and no villains. War is always a disaster and a sign of utter failure, not a glorious cause.
In my story, power ceaselessly searches for clever rationales by which to obscure facts and its own self-serving practices. When an formerly-effective rationale is exploded by revelations of its fraudulent nature, a new rationale is instantly put into place, usually under conditions of crisis–manufactured, if need be.
In my story, centuries pass this way–with power always staying a step ahead of those who would question their legitimacy and their most basic assumptions of right and wrong.
In general, people are played and manipulated by whatever chords resonate in them most strongly; thus, the gung-ho, who believe in “might-makes-right” are appealed to on that ground, by the wisdom of the use of force. Those who cherish truth and justice will be told that our cause is true and just, and so on.
Always, always, always, real fairness and real democratic principles are continuously pushed further and further back by those who profit from their prevention on the grounds that these are impractical and unrealistic.
Holders of money and privileges assert the features as wealth and privilege as signs of their worthiness and as measures by which people offer themselves and are chosen for public “service”, while those unable who lack these are dismissed as candidates for such service.
In my story, there is room for neither euphoria nor despair. Both are misplaced. The only sane approach is constant and determined effort in the face of and the recognition of an inevitable mix of progress and set-backs.
No one is blessed or cursed in strict accordance to his deserts; many undeserving prosper while many deserving founder. The many suffer at the hands of the few and often due to sheer and needless ignorance.
There is also generosity and courage amidst the selfishness and cowardice. There are the inspired and inspiring geniuses as well as the dull and superstitious. People often as readily lend their attention and their trust to charlatans as to men and women of virtue.
My story has no beginning, no middle and no end. It offers no moral, has no guiding point, no purpose, and its aim is neither to instruct nor to amuse. In its cast there have numbered every human who ever drew a breath, however briefly, and all their attendant props and fixtures. The vast majority of them were as unknown in their own time as they are to us today. Now that they are gone, they exist no more. For in my story, there is only the world as we see it and know it here–no after-life and no before-life, either.
Whatever there is or can be of justice or goodness always depends on those in the present to fashion and defend it; but nothing shall require them to do so if they choose not to.
There are also love and hate, anger and joy, fortune and misfortune, wisdom and folly, science and superstition; all of them contending in a riotous mix.
It isn’t simply the play of the “law of the jungle” for there exist both jungle and varying degrees of civilization.
You come into the story as it proceeds “in progress”. There are no ultimately authoritative maps or guides, but there are those who offer themselves as such. Everything depends on you to reason out, as best you can. You have to sort the true from the false, the genuine from the phony, the friends from the foes and the important from the insignificant. Whatever you need of meaning and purpose, you must find and borrow or make for yourself.
Your role is undetermined in its nature, its importance and its duration. And your own efforts shall be only a part of what eventually comes to pass. Much that is beyond your control shall play an essential part in what befalls you though, again, none of it is predestined.
Welcome to my story –and yours.
I’m not sure how to best respond to this, because while you make some valid points, what you are describing is not a story — at least the way I understand the term.
Here’s the giveaway:
Every story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are stories that are pointless — I should know, I end up telling a few from time to time — but when I choose a story to tell it’s usually because I think the hearer will gain something from it if they care to listen and learn. Maybe they pick up a moral. Maybe they just get a laugh and an escape from their lives for a minute or two. Sometimes, happily, they get both.
What you describe is an interlocking series of stories, and each of us is the hero of their own story. That story has triumphs and tragedies, there are sorrows and even despair, but there is also happiness and sometimes elation. And these stories don’t necessarily repeat themselves, but they rhyme. We are now in the midst of a situation where, if we choose to, we can look to the story of the American Revolution for inspiration. A story that has a war at its center. War is a horrible and lamentable thing, but the United States — the idea that we can choose our own leaders, that the King is not infalliable, and that dissent is not only not treasonous, it’s downright patriotic — would not have come about had it not been for that war.
I think perhaps we see the world from two different points of view. Thanks for sharing yours.
First & last para’s from Jason Miller’s The Rendition of Christ: Winning the Battle for their Souls
For once, I am speechless. That’s a mighty feat, amigo! đŸ™‚
Danni and I share a fascination with Arabian Nights and all that is Bagdhad. Yesterday, while we were tooling around town, we found a store from Nepal that has…. incense, brass lamps…
and authentic belly dancer uniforms. JINGLE JINGLE!
One was bright magenta and it called to me… but not yet. I have many miles to march before I am “free” to travel to Iraq and visit an old friend and share stories.
“War is a horrible and lamentable thing, but the United States — the idea that we can choose our own leaders, that the King is not infallible, and that dissent is not only not treasonous, it’s downright patriotic — would not have come about had it not been for that war.”
That’s a fact that bears much more and much better consideration, then, I believe.
Your Right-wing ideologue audience may, on hearing your tale of democratic daring, reply, “Duh! That’s what we’re, like, all about in Iraq and Afghanistan, dude!”
Notice: at no time has this very same story of yours prevented Americans from doing step-by-step those things which bring us now to this pass,
not in 1812, not in 1846, not in 1860, nor in 1898, nor in 1899 *, not in the numerous “police actions” conducted throughout Central and South America in the early 20th century, not in 1916– at no time has our war-ridden history stopped a president determined to go adventuring once more into war, always for the noblest of reasons–so he claimed.
Perhaps the story, then, is fraught with error-bearing memes * .
I do agree that formulating a compelling story is of indispensable importance and largely for the same reasons that you urge it. On this point, we are virtually in agreement. It remains to discover what the compelling story should relate if we’re to avoid more of the same old same old.
We need better stories, true. But what they should say is not so clear.
[ * The term “meme” (IPA: [miːm]), coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, refers to a replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Other examples include deities, concepts, ideas, theories, opinions, beliefs, practices, habits, dances and moods which propagate within a culture. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution analogous in many ways to the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes. ]
I want us to tell stories to the American people about the brave exploits of our forefathers who fought and sometimes died to throw off the chains of tyranny right here in America. Not in places they have to look up on a map like Candahar or Tikrit, but in places like Lexington and Bunker Hill and Yorktown that every American knows about.
There are no Paul Reveres in Iraq. There are no Patrick Henrys in Afghanistan. There is only the great horde, riding in to impose its government on a people who don’t understand it and didn’t choose it, and resent what it stands for.
And if the right wing ideologues that you mention think the story represents something else, well, the story wasn’t meant for them anyway. It was meant for the decent, hard-working people of the country who have forgotten their history.
The right-wing ideologues are part of this story, but they are the Tories, not the Minutemen. The story of the American Revolution isn’t for the Tories. It’s for the Americans who seem to have forgotten that if you hang together, you can defeat the Tories and the tyrants and proclaim liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof. And if you don’t, you will all hang separately.
I really did understand your points–even the first time.