| Number 284 | January 7, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Well, I'm still in a reflective mood, so this week I take another look back at the year 2004. (When will this end? Next week.) Readers have many times asked me to publish a compilation of Nygaard Notes "Quotes" of the Week, so it has become an annual feature. As always, I published far too many quotations in the past year to fit into one issue. If I wanted to publish them all, it would take up about four "typical" issues of the Notes. That's too much. They're interesting, but they're not THAT interesting. So, I picked out my favorites from the year, based on whim and entertainment value, and the result is the double-issue's worth of quotations that you see before you. Three-and-a-half years ago I published an explanation of how and why I choose a quotation to become the Nygaard Notes "Quote" of the Week. An updated version of that appears this week, as well, since a lot of new readers have come on board since August of 2001, and they probably wonder about this process. Or, maybe they don't wonder about it, but I think they will find the explanation interesting and informative, anyway. I think we all have in our heads our own files of "Quotes" of the Week - that is, things that we hear or read that stick with us and that we repeat to others. By explaining how I consciously choose mine, perhaps it will help people to understand how we all unconsciously choose our own. I won't tell you what to expect next week, since I've learned that these promises are often wrong, but I will say that it is taking a lot of research. That's usually a good sign. Until then, I remain, Nygaard |
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There are three types of quotations that attain the status of a Nygaard Notes "Quote" of the Week. And a lofty status it is. Let me say a few words about these QOTWs, just so you understand a little bit about why I do these things. Part of the reason I do them - a not inconsiderable part - is simple amusement. But there are serious criteria that must be met, as well. Type 1: The Stand-Alone Quotation The first, and least common, type of QOTW is the utterances that can be fully understood simply by reading them-I call these "stand-alone" quotations-but which say so much in a few words that they are worth repeating. A great example was my QOTW from NN #247, which had the Children's Defense Fund pointing out that "A budget is not simply a spending plan, it is a statement of values and priorities." Clear and simple. Another kind of stand-alone quotation is the one which very briefly challenges a widely-held belief that just happens to be wrong. Look at the pair of "quotes" in NN #250: A U.S. spokesman in Iraq says, "We believe in freedom of the press." Everyone knows that, right? Yet in the same article we read this: "American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the door..." My hope is that this sort of dissonance helps people to consider that an "obvious" belief may be a little more complex and worth thinking about. A third type of stand-alone quotation is the one that simply means a lot to me and that I want people to read and think about. In NN #262 I offered these words from Twin Cities activist and artist Ricardo Levins Morales: "The slogan 'Let's Take America Back,' being pushed by some well-meaning populists should be buried immediately! Unless they mean 'back to 1491,' it represents nostalgia for a golden era that only makes sense if it is racially coded to exclude vast numbers of our people. Whenever that time was, I, for one, do not want to go back there and am appalled that I'd be invited. The 'good old days' don't look so good from the other side of the tracks!" Type 2: The Ironic Quotation The second type of quotation that becomes a QOTW meets a more subtle criterion. These are the quotations that were said with the apparent intention of communicating one thing, but that I think unintentionally (and often unconsciously) communicate a quite different thing. In other words, they are ironic. The advertising press is chock-full of these types of comments. As in the QOTW of NN #265, where I quote the NY Times speaking about "a popular commercial for Select Comfort mattresses... The spot was so popular that people wrote in about it... But while the character was selected for his authenticity and he was not an actor, his story was not real. It was scripted by the ad agency." Here's what one Mr. Rich Roth, a creative director at the ad agency, said about this ad: "We tried to capture that spontaneous feeling of reality - to capture things that don't feel scripted, whether they are or not." One cannot get much more ironic than that, methinks. And this irony spills over into all aspects of politics and public life, so I think it is important to recognize it. Hence, this comment becomes a QOTW. Type 3: Illuminating The Rules Perhaps you have wondered why so many public figures so often say things that are not true. The reason is that they know The Rules. The Rules spell out the universally-understood range of "acceptable speech" to which public figures must adhere if they wish to be taken "seriously" and quoted in the mainstream press. Sometimes the things these public figures say - or the responses they get when they say them - serve to illuminate these ever-changing rules. This is the third type of Nygaard Notes "Quotes" of the Week. A couple of examples: If you want to talk about Social Security, and you want anyone to hear you, you have to say that you are committed to "saving" it, which means that you believe it is in "crisis." It's not in crisis, as I will explain in detail in the coming weeks, but anyone who wishes to be quoted in the major media has to say it is. Whether they believe it or not is secondary. (On the bright side, organized efforts by grassroots activists are challenging this rule, with some success. Stay tuned on this one.) A second example would be health care. If you wish to be quoted on the subject in respectable circles, you must indicate that you "know" that the U.S. public will not accept greater government intervention in the health care system. Polls indicate that this, too, is false, but even to imply that you think the solution to our crisis in health care may be best addressed by public - that is, government - actions will keep you out of the New York Times and off of ABC News, unless they happen to be doing a story about the lunatic fringe. I look for "Quotes" of the Week that bear witness to the fact that there IS a set of rules that dictate what can and cannot be said by public figures in this country. This type of QOTW falls into two categories. In one case, I quote otherwise intelligent and/or progressive folks saying things in public that are false and that they most likely know are false. Do they do this because they are lying hypocrites? No, they do it because they are ambitious and they know The Rules. The second category of this type of QOTW is the opposite case. That is, I look for instances in which a public official actually says something that violates The Rules but, for whatever reason, gets reported in the media anyway. I then look for the quotations that show how they get ridiculed, or that show how the "experts" come in to tell us how wrong the figure was to say whatever it was, or (if it's campaign season) I might quote the not-long-in-coming attack ads that use the violations as source material. There you have it: Some "Quotes" stand alone. Some "Quotes" are too ironic to pass up. And some "Quotes" help us understand The Rules of Public Discourse. If the media offer quotations that meet one or more of these criteria, they are candidates for the Nygaard Notes "Quote" of the Week. Send in your own nominations! |
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From NN #239, January 16, 2004: "Quote" #1: The lead paragraph from a Los Angeles Times article of September 30, 2003: "The share of Americans without health insurance increased last year by the largest amount in a decade, bringing the total number without coverage to 43.6 million, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today." "Quote" #2: From the Associated Press (reprinted in the Star Tribune) on January 9, 2004: "The United States spends more per person than any other developed nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For 2001, America spent 47 percent more per person than Switzerland, the second biggest spender per capita, the OECD said." Note: Switzerland has no uninsured people since, like all other wealthy countries in the world except the USA, they have a national system of universal health care.
From the New York Times, January 15th, page 17: "The president and Congress should immediately begin work to achieve health insurance coverage for all Americans by 2010, the National Academy of Sciences said on [January 14]. "'It is time for our nation to extend coverage to everyone,' the academy's Institute of Medicine said, in a report intended to put the issue back atop the national agenda. The report, summarizing three years of work by a panel of 15 experts, concluded, 'Universal insurance coverage is an important and achievable goal for the country.' "Since President Bill Clinton's plan for universal coverage failed in 1994, Congress has taken steps to expand coverage for children and for people who lose or switch jobs. But the panel said such incremental steps were inadequate. 'Comprehensive reform of the health insurance system, rather than expansion of the safety net, is essential,' it said. "Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, co-chairman of the panel, said: 'This is not just an issue for the uninsured or the least fortunate among us. It's a matter of enlightened self-interest for everyone.'
"Health care reform is again near the top of the political agenda. Health care costs have turned sharply upward. The number of Americans without insurance or with inadequate coverage rose even in the boom years of the 1990s. Medicare and Medicaid are threatened by ill-conceived reform schemes, and middle-class voters are very concerned about the abuses of managed care. Other wealthy countries manage to provide universal health care at half the cost we pay. Their problems stem mainly from inadequate funding, not the structure of their systems. In contrast, the problems in the United States are systemic. Incremental changes cannot solve them; further reliance on market-based strategies will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself." That's the concluding paragraph from an article called "Proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance." It ran in the August 13, 2003 issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
From NN #250, April 2, 2004: On March 29th, the New York Times ("All The News That's Fit To Print") ran a story with the headline: "G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Critical of U.S." In it, we read that "American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the door..." On March 30, the Times quoted Dan Senor, "spokesman for the occupation authorities," commenting on this shutdown of the newspaper (which "was a tough decision to make", he said): "We believe in freedom of the press."
From a February 5, 2004 article in the New York Times ("All The News That's Fit To Print") headlined, "U.S. Image Abroad Will Take Years to Repair, Official Testifies," come the following words: "Margaret D. Tutwiler, in her first public appearance as the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy, acknowledged Wednesday that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such an extent that 'it will take us many years of hard, focused work' to restore it. "Representative Jim Kolbe, an Arizona Republican, cited polls showing that only 15 percent of Indonesians, 7 percent of Saudis and 15 percent of Turks have a favorable image of America-despite their governments' friendly relations with Washington. "[Tutwiler] said she was determined to work within the existing budget of about $600 million for worldwide public diplomacy, which includes a wide range of efforts, including exchange programs, partnerships between American embassies and local institutions, distributing textbooks and supplying textbooks to local schools."
The New York Times on February 20th ran an article headlined "Washington's Arabic TV Effort Gets Mixed Reviews." The piece spoke about "An American-sponsored satellite television station broadcasting in Arabic, probably Washington's biggest propaganda effort since the attempts to undermine the Soviet bloc and the Castro government..." The station is called Al Hurra (in English: "The Free One"). Commenting on the PR effort, here is Mustafa B. Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan: "I think the Americans are mistaken if they assume they can change their image in the region. People became anti-American because they don't like American policies." Forgive me, but I just have to add the following telling comment contrasting the Arab news station Al Jazeera with Al Hurra, which was buried deep in the article. On a typical broadcasting day in February... "While Al Jazeera was broadcasting live the afternoon briefing from Baghdad given by a United States general and the senior United States civilian spokesman, Al Hurra was showing a documentary about the actor Anthony Hopkins."
Here's what "President" Bush said on May 6 about the torture of Iraqis by U.S. troops, according to a front-page article in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!): "It's a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation. I fully understand that. And that's why it's important that justice be done." Hello? Morality? Human rights? International law? Can anyone think of any other reasons why "justice" might be "important?" Someone help the President, please...
United States President Lyndon Johnson used to refer to people who had qualms about his Vietnam policy as "Nervous Nellies." Perhaps a Nervous Nellie is a variety of "hand-wringer?" Consider the following words from White House spokesman Scott McClellan, talking to reporters about a recently-leaked National Intelligence Estimate from July that, as it turns out, was quite "pessimistic" about what was and is going on in Iraq, despite Mr. Bush's repeated assertions that "progress is being made." Mr. McClellan said: "You know, every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and hand-wringers who said it can't be done. And every step of the way, the Iraqi leadership and the Iraqi people have proven them wrong because they are determined to have a free and peaceful future."
National Public Radio, November 10: "The [U.S.] military has not issued any civilian casualty figures at all." The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), November 12: "No civilian casualty figures have been made available." The New York Times, November 15: "Military commanders point to several accomplishments in Falluja. A bastion of resistance has been eliminated, with lower than expected American military and Iraqi civilian casualties." See, this is what you get when you "embed" reporters with one side in a conflict.
From NN #259, June 18, 2004: In the New York Times of June 4, 2004 ran a story headlined: "Store for Designer Clothes Tries to Sell a Political Viewpoint." Apparently, "The entire window display" of the Marc by Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street in Manhattan "has been given over to partisan sentiment of an intensity that seems highly unusual for a major American fashion designer." There are images of "President" Bush and Colin Powell, and it implies that they have not always told the truth. "Retailing experts called the display a risky strategy," the Times tells us. And why? The answer was supplied by one Candace Corlett, a partner in WSL Strategic Retail, a New York consulting company: "A store is supposed to be a place where you escape reality, lose yourself in the fun of fashion, buy yourself a treat. Smacking customers in the face with a political issue - it's breaking the shopping karma."
In his recent strategy paper on the upcoming presidential election - "The Lizard Strategy; or How to Defeat Bush Without Losing Our Souls" - Twin Cities activist and artist Ricardo Levins Morales made this comment in talking about the John Kerry campaign: "The slogan 'Let's Take America Back,' being pushed by some well-meaning populists should be buried immediately! Unless they mean 'back to 1491,' it represents nostalgia for a golden era that only makes sense if it is racially coded to exclude vast numbers of our people. Whenever that time was, I, for one, do not want to go back there and am appalled that I'd be invited. The 'good old days' don't look so good from the other side of the tracks!"
Here's the headline from a story in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of August 30, talking about the Republican convention in New York: "For GOP, Moderation is Key at Convention; Republicans Will Put Centrists Front and Center to Appeal to Undecided Voters." Here's the headline from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, same day, same subject: "Bush's Big Priority: Energize Conservative Christian Base; Unusual Strategy Plays Down Importance of Swing Vote As Demographics Shift." Well, I guess that settles that.
"The 1965 Voting Rights Act was among the crowning achievements of the civil rights era, and a defining moment for social justice and equality. The stories of the men and women who were willing to lay down their lives for the full rights of citizenship, including first and foremost the right to vote, are the stuff of history. Their accomplishments can never be erased. Yet . . . attempts to erode and undermine those victories have never ceased. Voter intimidation is not a relic of the past, but a pervasive strategy used with disturbing frequency in recent years. Sustaining the bright promise of the civil rights era, and maintaining the dream of equal voting rights for every citizen requires constant vigilance, courageous leadership, and an active, committed and well-informed citizenry." From the August 2004 report "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America," found on the web at http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/ )
Bookends Near the beginning of the year (From NN #247, March 12, 2004) I ran this "quote," from the Children's Defense Fund report of February 6th, entitled "Robin Hood in Reverse: Bush Administration Budget Choices Take from Poor Children to Give to the Rich:" "A budget is not simply a spending plan, it is a statement of values and priorities." Then, without remembering that "quote," I ran this one in the very last issue of 2004 (From NN #283, December 31, 2004): An excellent opinion piece appeared in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) on December 27th, titled "This Season, Realize That State Budget Is a Moral Document." Authors Vic Rosenthal and Suzanne Bring of Jewish Community Action in St. Paul state that, "While most people are focused on giving gifts to their own families, many are very charitable" during the holiday season. Then they said this: "While individual acts of charity build a stronger sense of community, and may meet the immediate needs of the poor and homeless, they do not get to the underlying causes of oppression. Homelessness and lack of insurance can only be dealt with through budgets, state and federal, that provide sufficient funding to meet the needs of everyone in our community. That requires a budget which meets the needs of our community, that reflects the moral values of giving. Our state budget is a moral document and there is no better time to realize that than now, during this holiday season." |