Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Doing The DC Bob
You'da Thought Moscow Was Too Big To Move
In Washington, it’s everywhere, like God and mendacity: The DC Bob.
As people talk, in fern bars, in eateries, on the sidewalk, an incorrect
thought occurs – something that might upset Them. You know who They are:
The racial, sexual, religious, and political groups that One Doesn’t Offend,
the ideas and policies one mustn’t mention, the simple observations of
fact that one may not make. We all know where trouble lies. And we are
careful.
The incipient malefactor leans forward. He’s getting closer to
his hearers to avoid eavesdroppers. Next he drops his chin and looks
furtively over each shoulder in turn to see who might be listening.
This is the DC Bob. It is routine. People don’t even notice that they
are doing it.
The heretic whispers, “I’m sick of affirmative-action hires. We
can’t get anything done in my office….”
The DC Bob. You have to watch what you say in America.
A while back I attended a party of people in government. I didn’t
know them. They knew me indirectly from this column. We clutched Heinekens
in the kitchen and chewed cheesy stuff on crackers. Pretending we weren’t,
we felt each other out to be sure none of us was with the thought police
(another ritual in Washington). The conversation came around to the
deterioration of American society. The subject is common. In fact, it
is close to inevitable.
One fellow finally said approximately, “I don’t get it. We all
know what’s going on. Why can’t we even talk about it? This isn’t the
Soviet Union.”
Ah, but, yes, actually, it is the Soviet Union. When people
have to look over their shoulders before speaking in public places –
when they are afraid to utter reasonable criticism of very questionable
governmental policies – we’ve reached the suburbs of Moscow. I’m not
trying to be cute about this. Ours is very much the same system of social
control, but without the truncheons. It’s cleverly done, so that we
have no way of revolting and nothing really to revolt against.
Yes, the penalties for political transgression are here lighter
than in the USSR, but methods vary little. If you criticized Stalin,
you got a bullet in the nape of the neck. Rubber hoses served their
soothing purpose, and there were the Gulag and psychiatric committal.
We don’t do these things here.
They aren’t necessary. To enforce conformity, the threat need not
be extreme, merely adequate. Here, if you say the wrong thing, you lose
your job. The years toward retirement vanish. The press savages you.
You don’t get tenure or, if you have it, you are shunned by the rest
of the faculty.— including those who secretly agree with you but are
afraid of the same treatment. This is enough. We don’t need thumbscrews.
Intimidation depends not just on penalties but upon the certainty,
or near certainty, of their application. In the Soviet Union, people
knew they would lose if they transgressed. They couldn’t run. The police
were faster. They couldn’t hide. The police would find them. They couldn’t
even die gloriously to make a statement. The government wouldn’t broadcast
it. Hopelessness breeds passivity. People may rebel against long odds.
They seldom rebel when they can accomplish nothing.
The same is true here. We can’t win – though the penalties are
not grisly, and do not always come from the formal government. If we
take the wrong position on the wrong subject, the federal EEO apparatus
will crush us. The feds know they can and drag a case out for a decade
spend us into submission. Institutions – companies, universities --
will force us to apologize and publicly humiliate us. If we go to another
university, apply for another job, the word will have gotten around
and we won’t be hired.
The fewer the people you can trust, the greater the intimidation.
In the Soviet Union, children were encouraged to rat out their parents.
Under Stalin, it could be fatal. Things aren’t so bad here. Our kids
are only occasionally asked to inform. (“Do your parents have guns?”)
But in school, children are steeped unendingly in Appropriate Thought.
In communist countries, it was more openly done, being honestly called
Marxism-Leninism or Mao Tse Dung Thought. In our schools it’s packaged
as immanent self-evident Goodness. The effect is to erect a police wall
between parents and children.
Do I exaggerate? Try telling your kid that Sojourner Truth and
Harriet Tubman (whoever she was) were perhaps not the central achievement
of Western Civilization, that there is an astronomical lopsidedness
by race in commission of crime, or that universal illegitimacy may involve
both immorality and irresponsibility. The tad will likely be horrified
that you are such a racist. Don’t teachers and the telescreen say so?
And so many parents speak carefully at home, checking to see that
the children aren’t listening. As in the Soviet Union, indoctrination
is the unspoken purpose of schooling.
Here, as in the USSR, the press -- in particular the ever-whispering
screen, half-ignored, babbling like a brook, slowly depositing assumptions,
views, unnoticed beliefs -- is the key to social control. Russians knew
they were being lied to, but they didn’t know how much. Our telescreens
lie more subtly, and thus more effectively. The principle is that if
people absorb one lie in two, tell them three. Soon they will believe…enough.
That is all it takes.
American journalism isn’t as controlled as that of the Soviet Union,
but it is controlled enough. In the media the punishment for deviationist
thought is swift and sure. We in the trade know exactly what we can
and cannot say. Criticize the wrong things and you will lose your job
and be, for practical purposes, blacklisted.
Many journalists of course know what is going on, assuredly including
editors of major publications. But, being intimidated, they intimidate.
Thus what we know we don’t write, and what we write we don’t believe.
Editorialists and columnists argue pointlessly within understood constraints,
like ping-pong balls bouncing between two walls. The walls are there.
One doesn’t step beyond.
Yet there is more to it. Editors do not control the content of
publications. Advertisers do – advertisers and the owners. If you buy
important amounts of advertising, you have veto power.
Sometimes the influence is quietly explicit. A major upper-middle-brow
magazine once assigned me a story that might have involved criticism
of defense contractors. The editor asked me to go easy on McDonnell-Douglas
because it advertised. This is not uncommon. But usually writers just
know what They don’t want. And they don’t write it. They are afraid.
Looking over our shoulders, dealing cautiously with strangers,
doing the DC Bob….
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