Imagineering

I hesitate to use a lovely term (coined, it seems by that great American Hondo Crouch) for an unlovely thing, but it struck me today that the word that best describes the behavior of the Bush Administration is imagineering.

The self-proclaimed mayor of the pseudotown of Luckenbach (pop. 3 when he bought it in 1970) in the unarguably large state of Texas had a business card that said:

Hondo Crouch
Imagineer

And the way he did it, imagineering was a good thing. By all accounts, Hondo was a multifaceted, gentle man. He was a business man, a poet and a wit. 

What happens when imagineering is done by a half-wit? Bad things. Bush and his claque don’t put much store in reality—that is to say, the reality you and I live in. The “reality-based community” didn’t get the memo, apparently: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

But strangely enough, when real reality rears its rather real head—for instance, a hurricane named Katrina arrives, or a quagmire named Iraq develops after a jaunty bit of shock and awe—the irreality coming from Bush and his yea-sayers merely intensifies. In the days before Katrina make landfall, when FEMA briefed Bush about the potential for levee failure in New Orleans and a human catastrophe of massive proportions, the Imagineer in Chief mouthed patent nonsense about being “fully prepared” to provide federal help. In July 2004, after listening to a grim analysis of the growing Iraqi insurgency written by the CIA Baghdad station chief, Bush said, according to U.S. News & World Report, “What is he, some kind of defeatist?” [via Sidney Blumenthal at Salon]

Recently Bush has taken to comparing himself with Lincoln. Now that’s imagineering. It’s all about creating an image (or an “imagining”)—invariably an upbeat, “positive” one—and pushing that figment until it becomes a meme in our degraded public discourse. When you’re setting up a new government in the land you’ve invaded and trashed, it doesn’t matter so much that the new leaders be competent or represent the people. What matters is that they say nice things about us. As former US proconsul in Iraq Paul Bremer describes it:

[T]he President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq’s ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: “It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.” According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush’s candidate for president of Iraq’s interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had “been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.” [emphasis mine]

If an Iraqi official says, “Thanks, America!” then everything’s alright over there. Only a defeatist would think otherwise.

Someone over at The Poor Man Institute put it perfectly:

Here’s my little translator’s key to this emerging talking point: Republicans attach incredible importance to media criticism of the war, because they genuinely believe that the war is won and lost IN THE MEDIA. The American media, that is. Their partisan selves are so thoroughly embedded in the culture-jamming electioneering of the Rovist personality cult the GOP has become that they genuinely don’t recognize the difference between actually achieving peace and a non-doomed secular democracy in Iraq, and just being able to plausibly claim that peace on American TV.