A few days ago I wrote about the eerily growing similarity between the Bush administration’s modus operandi and the tactics of George Orwell’s totalitarian construct of Big Brother. The president’s abruptly but subtly introduced policy change -- a vague timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq -- was precisely what his administration had vehemently argued against, and was now for, yet no administration official would dare confirm the stated change any more than Big Brother would have confirmed that Oceania’s enemy had at any time “changed” -- that its enemy was now Eurasia, no longer Eastasia, or vice versa.
War was perpetual and immutable for Big Brother. His enemy and objectives were always the same, even when his enemy and objectives were different, for to admit any change would have been to admit fallibility. And Big Brother was never wrong.
Today the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin also notes this eerie similarity of language manipulation between Bush and Big Brother. “Bush's avoidance of the word ‘war,’” for instance, “in the context of Iraq is the rule…. There is no war, except for the war that never ends [the ‘global war on terror’], and we're winning [despite all the glaring signs that we’re losing]…. There are plenty of potential Orwell analogies in Bush's use of language, and his historical revisionism.”
What fascinates me as much as official manipulation of language, however, is the roughly one-third of the public that persists in accepting it -- that one-third known as Bush’s base. How is it that otherwise normally functioning, reasonably intelligent adults could swallow such patent nonsense? How is it that any Party member, at this late and miserable stage, could deflect reality so effectively and thus continue buying into Bush’s surreal distortions?
And to this question Orwell had an answer that we know to be a psychological truism in the surreal politics of today. He -- rather, Big Brother -- called it crimestop, meaning “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the Party], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
Protective stupidity -- the desperate need of, it appears from polling numbers, fully one-third of the American public to shield itself from ever admitting error and blindly follow the conspicuously corrupt and discredited leadership of the Bush administration.
Network talking heads and print pundits are almost eulogistic when citing what they label as Bush’s abysmally low numbers. But to me, one-third of nearly 300 million people is a frightfully high fraction of willful, protective stupidity.