POLITICAL BUNRAKU
John Chuckman
For those who are not familiar, Bunraku is an old form of
Japanese puppet theater, its distinctive characteristic being that the
puppeteers are on the stage with their puppets, dressed in black so that the
audience can pretend not to see them.
While many old art forms have conventions that are
unrealistic by modern standards, there is something particularly unsatisfying
about bunraku: you can pretend not to see the puppeteers but you cannot fail to
see them.
Bunraku, as it happens, offers a remarkable metaphor for some
contemporary operations of American foreign policy. So many times – in Syria,
Ukraine, Libya, Venezuela, Egypt - we see dimly the actors on stage, yet we are
supposed to pretend they are not there. We can’t identify them with precision,
but we know they are there. Most oddly, the press in the United States, and to
a lesser extent that of its various allies and dependents, pretends to report
what is happening without ever mentioning the actors. They report only the
movements of the puppets.
One of the consequences of this kind of activity is that
many people, including many of your own, come simply not to believe you, no matter
what newspapers and government spokespersons keep saying. Another consequence
is that because many knowledgeable people no longer believe you, when it comes
time to enlist the support of other nations for your activities, you must use
behind-the-scenes pressure and threats, stretching the boundaries of alliance
and friendship. After all, your major government friends and allies have
sophisticated intelligence services themselves and are often aware of what you
are trying to do.
Still another consequence is that many people start doubting
what you are saying concerning other topics. In the United States, a fairly large
segment of the population does not believe the official version of a great deal
of comparatively-recent American history, including explanations of John
Kennedy’s assassination, of events around 9/11, of the downing of TWA Flight
800, of what Israel was doing when it attacked an American spy ship in 1967,
and of the CIA’s past heavy connections with cocaine trafficking – just to name
a few outstanding examples.
Government in America feels the need only to go so far in
its efforts to explain such matters because the doubters and skeptics, though
many, are not a big enough segment of the population to matter greatly in
political terms, and it is simply brutally true that the great passive mass of
people are never well informed about anything outside their own lives. America
is a place, as relatively few people abroad understand, where people must work
very hard. Its industrial working class went through a great depression since,
say, 1960, many of them now holding low-paid service jobs. Its middle-class
workers have seen real incomes decline for decades, something providing part of
the incentive for both parents in a family to work and for them to move into
America’s great suburban sprawl of lower land costs as well as to embrace stores
such as Wal-Mart with their bare-bones costs. Many Americans work so hard, they
have little time to be concerned or informed about government, satisfying
themselves that a few minutes with corporate television news is adequate, a
phenomenon favoring the government’s interests since on any important and
controversial subject the television networks (and the major newspapers) do the
government’s bidding, mostly without being asked. American corporate news,
especially in matters of foreign affairs, resembles nothing so much as nightly coverage
of a banraku performance.
Selling stuff, whether it’s widgets or religion or political
ideas, is at the core of American life, and America’s one unquestionably
original creation in the modern world involves the disciplines of marketing,
advertising, and public relations – all highly artful aspects of selling stuff.
The success of these methods has long been proved in American commerce, but
they are no less effective when applied to other areas. So, it should hardly
surprise that the same “arts” are heavily employed by and on behalf of
government in propaganda and opinion-manipulation around its acts and policies.
Indeed, we see America’s entire election system today having been reduced to little
more than a costly, massive application of these crafty skills, and no
department or agency of government is ever without its professional, full-time
spokespeople and creative back-up staff, making sure that whatever words or
numbers are spoken or printed never slip beyond what those arts have conjured
up. Unacceptable photos, say those of women and children smashed by bombs or
missiles hurled into the Mideast, are made simply to disappear much as they
were in 1984.
Government knows, too, that the American political system is
heavily stacked against people with doubts ever gaining serious influence. Ninety-five
percent of Senate elections go to incumbents, and because only one-third of the
Senate faces re-election at any given election, a majority on some new matter
is virtually impossible to build. The presidential candidates of the only two
parties with a hope of being elected are almost as carefully groomed and
selected as the party chairman of a former communist-bloc country, and
generally about as surprising in their views.
And always, time makes people forget, even with the most
terrible issues. After a generation or two, there are relatively few people who
are even aware there was an issue. In the case of the most overwhelming and
terrifying event of my life, the Vietnam War, polls show a huge number of young
Americans today don’t know what it was or when it occurred.
These are the key factors permitting an American government
to commission horrific acts abroad resembling those of the bloodiest tyrant, all
while it smilingly prances across the international stage as democracy’s self-designated
chief representative and advocate. As for the great mass of people, the 95% of
humanity living outside the United States, no one in America’s government ever
gives them a moment’s thought, unless they step out of line.
