Six Questions for Mark Crispin Miller, Author of ‘Fooled Again’

No Comment

BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED January 24, 2008

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of culture and communications at New York University. He’s also a man on a mission: to make the case for electoral reform. Miller climbs into the minutiae of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections-voter caging in Florida, ballot stickers in Ohio, and lots of unseemly details in between. The core of his argument unfolded in “None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press” which appeared in the August 2005 issue of Harper’s. It evolved into Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform in 2005. And in the end, he tells us that notwithstanding the reassurances of the mainstream media, we have no reason to be confident in the formally reported results of those two elections. The paperback edition came out earlier this year, with an extensive afterward and much updated material. No Comment puts six questions to Harper’s contributor, author and media critic, Mark Crispin Miller, about his book, the mainstream media, and the art of political persecution in America today.

1. One of the most striking things I saw in your book was on the fly page, where you very cleverly juxtapose quotations from Tom Paine, T.W. Adorno and Tom DeLay–all of them are on the topic of truth and power, it seems to me. But the Adorno quote is particularly fascinating, it’s taken from an essay he wrote at the end of World War II, in which he’s drawing a very important lesson: that the totalitarian states the Allies were battling had mastered the technique of using power to generate their own truth, and to make anything inconsistent with it seem a lie. And this is precisely the same point that George Orwell and Victor Klemperer made, both writing the same year. Of course, as I read your book, your point is not that America has become a totalitarian state, but rather that political forces within the country are making rather more subtle use of the same techniques. Am I reading this correctly?

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, Bush & Co.’s vast inversions of the truth–distortions infinitely larger than mere lying–are the product of a conscious and deliberate “technique,” as you put it. And yet, they’re also, at the same time, a ferociously sincere expression of the way these mad authoritarians perceive reality. In other words, when Bush and Cheney and their cohorts say that up is down and black is white, they are not just dispassionately following a certain set of rules for doing propaganda. Such fierce untruthfulness comes to them naturally, because their world-view is completely paranoid.