As the Top Wobbleth
By DAVID VEST
"Spinning spinning spinning, spinning like a spinning top," sang the fabulous Little Richard in my youth. Why does no one abduct Little Richard from California and force him to return to New Orleans to record one more great album before we lose him forever? I never tire of hearing The Specialty Sessions, especially the outtakes. I dearly love the moment when a clueless white-bread engineer cuts Richard off in mid-song, advising him that he sounds almost as though he were screaming and that the band is having to play louder to be heard over him. After a brief moment of profound silence, Little Richard sighs, "Tired as I am and I got nothing but soul," addressing no one but himself and posterity.
"Life is a top which whipping sorrow driveth," wrote the ever-cheerful Fulke Greville, First Baron Brooke, the most unjustly neglected poet of the English renaissance. (His Elegy for Sir Philip Sidney is one of the greatest poems in the language.)
Rare would be the child today, grown or not, who has played with the kind of top that Greville had in mind. Or, increasingly, with any kind of top in this age of high-tech toys. I was at a party recently where no one knew what a yo-yo was. But we are not unfamiliar, we moderns, with the concept of spin.
From the borrowed flight suit to the fake turkey in Baghdad, from the staged filming of the Jessica Lynch rescue to the fabricated-and-quickly-withdrawn "President Bush sends his regards" at the resurrection of Saddam Hussein, we are getting used to learning later that what we were shown and told did not happen "quite that way."
For the U.S. military, bald-faced lying has become a routine part of "the war effort." Part of "winning hearts and minds." Simply reporting what has happened is not good enough. It has to be "presented" in the "right light."
In a better world, people would be court-martialed for lying to the American people while wearing the uniform of the United States. In this one, they are given promotions. Promotion promotions. And perhaps leveraged into post-combat careers at Hill & Knowlton or, if all else fails, corporate communications.
Now, at the top of the year, while not disregarding past efforts to spin reality until it produces something like butter, it is time to contemplate future spin, contingency spin, new forms of spin that may be expected to wobble forth in 2004.
I assure you, it is not too early. The spinning has already begun. For example:
Should the U.S. experience a major terror attack later this year (say, anytime after the two majors parties have effectively engaged each other in the presidential campaign), the White House will likely portray it as an "attempt to influence the election" and urge Americans to stand up to terror by ... guess what?... re-electing Bush.
Can't you hear them now? Dick Armey, Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, all swearing that we are not going to let terrorists "dictate the outcome" of this election? Re-elect the President ... otherwise the terrorists win.
William Safire, ever on the spinning edge, had already predicted such an attack before the sun went down on the old year, even casting it as a likely "October surprise" in his column in the New York Times. You don't suppose he made that up out of the blue, on a slow day, do you? Wanna buy a watch?
Merely by associating the concept of a "terror attack" with the phrase "October surprise," Safire makes it sound like something Democrats, not terrorists, would do. As if to say, if they would benefit from it, they must somehow be guilty of it.
Doubtless the Democrats are doing contingency spin planning of their own. I hope so. When I last peeked they were still spinning the last election, to the effect that you would think Ralph Nader had been elected.
Meanwhile, the nation waits for the next mad cow to stagger and fall. When the first case was reported, did you notice that the Secretary of Agriculture rushed forward to protect not the American people but the corporate cattle industry? Whipping sorrow indeed.
Just as the former governor of Texas, G. W. Bush, had rushed forward the morning after Columbine with new legislation to protect not our children but the gun industry.
Just as, hours after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, the chairman of Exxon flew not to Alaska but to New York, to reassure the financial community that the company's stock was okay.
And to think we laughed at Baghdad Bob. Why, come to think of it, did we laugh at him? Was it because his lies were so outrageous or because he was so pathetically incompetent at doing what the Karl Roves of our world do so well?
Or was it because even while his country crumbled around him the spinning continued?
David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here. |
