Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 2: Politicians

     Some of the world’s biggest humbugs are politicians, especially when they’re running for office.

     Suppose you were to ask a hundred people, “How are jobs created?” Chances are, every one of them will tell you that jobs are created when someone produces a good or a service at a reasonable price and needs help somewhere in production or sales—or words to that effect. Suppose you ask these same people, “What causes people to choose one tourist destination over another?” That’s a big more complex, but most people will give you a pretty reasonable answer.

     In short, most people have a fairly clear understanding of cause and effect. They know how jobs are created, they know how tourism is generated, they know that crime is caused by criminals, that dumping toxic waste into water causes the water to be unsafe to drink, and so on. Somehow, though, common sense flies completely out the window when political candidates make campaign promises.

     During every election year, politicians who have never created goods, services, or anything else of value in their entire lives promise to create thousands or even millions of jobs. Astonishingly, millions of otherwise sensible people actually believe them. Politicians who have never sat at the desk of a travel agency promise to attract thousands of new tourists each day to certain places without having the slightest clue as to why people would want to go there.

     Do you believe that swarms of tourists will want to descend on such places as Timmonsville, South Carolina; or Whitman, Nebraska? No? Would you believe it if a political candidate promised that he’d cause it to happen and didn’t even bother to explain how he’d do it? If you’re like most voters, you probably would.

     Timmonsville is my hometown. It was a sleepy little town of 2,100 people when I was growing up there, but it has recently grown a bit livelier. Now a bustling dystopia of 2,320 people, Timmonsville recently has had several murders; and the town council is playing a shell game with the town government’s debt. There are 100 women for every 70 men in Timmonsville, partly because 38% of the households are headed by women with children.

     The last time crowds of tourists descended on Timmonsville was July 14, 1955, during the centennial celebration. For the sesquicentennial in 2005, though, they seem to have figured that there was nothing to celebrate.

     According to one web site, there are 59 attractions in the Timmonsville area. Not one of them has a Timmonsville address, most are over 30 miles from Timmonsville, and a fourth of them are over 40 miles from Timmonsville. The town doesn’t have a movie theater or a newspaper, probably because town gossips can entertain and misinform you in real time.

     If murder, political incompetence, genealogical mysteries, and the articulate form of cannibalism are too taxing for your system, you might vacation in Whitman, Nebraska. It’s an unincorporated community situated about 100 miles from the nearest interstate highway and over 20 miles from the nearest crossroads town. It sounds like a great vacation spot for recovering heart patients.

     From one of the photos I’ve seen on the Internet, I see that there’s a hill somewhere within sight of Whitman, Nebraska. I’ve been through both Kansas and Nebraska, and I was taken aback by the realization that there was a hill in either of those two states. You could stand near the South Dakota border, look southward, and see almost into Oklahoma. If treated to the right kind of publicity, a million tourists from Kansas and Nebraska might be eager to travel hundreds of miles to see what a hill looks like. The brick-veneer, vacant storefront could be converted to provide travel information, in case hills are so unfamiliar to the tourists that they need someone to point it out for them.

     A politician wouldn’t have to give a reason for tourists to swarm to Timmonsville or Whitman. All he’d have to do is promise a field of dreams based on the notion, “If you promise it, they will come.”

     People also have the notion that politicians—particularly officeholders—are experts on every political issue. They’re not. Ideally, a politician specializes in one or two areas and tries to become conversant in other areas. Mostly, he relies on well-informed staff to supply the deficit in his knowledge.

     Most people have the idea that, if you want something done in (for example) Congress, you go to your congressman. That’s a dumb idea. He didn’t get elected because he understands the issues; he got elected because he’s a good actor and salesman—and has a more impressive head of hair than most men (assuming the congressman is a man) his age.  Senator Christopher Dodd, at left, was born in 1944.   At age 68, he has more hair than most men have at 48.

     You get things done by finding out which staff member knows the most about your issue and is likely to be sympathetic to your position. You won’t have to waste his time and yours getting him up to speed on the issue. Once you have the staff member on your side, keep in touch with him (or her). The staff member knows what the congressman knows and doesn’t know, and will save everyone time explaining the issue to the congressman.

     There’s another reason you should avoid seeing the congressman right off the bat, especially during an election campaign. To most people, every political issue is either a human need or a human desire. To most congressmen, every political issue is a public relations opportunity. This puts you and your congressman at cross purposes.

     If you don’t believe me, look at your congressman’s eyes when you try to explain your situation to him, and they’ll tell you what he’s thinking. He’s not listening to understand your point; he’s listening to locate your hot button. Once he thinks he has found it, he’ll reach into his bag of sound bites and spout one for you. Sound bites don’t help constituents, but they do help the congressman’s image in the eyes of the sheeple.

      Even when your congressman pats you on the back, he may be just feeling for a place to put the knife.

     One of my favorite quotes in literature comes from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Even after the little dog Toto had exposed the “wizard” as a fraud, the main characters in the story demanded that the “wizard” keep his impossible promises to them. He responded by conning them again, this time with a clock, a medal, and a diploma. After Dorothy, the tin woodman, the scarecrow, and the lion left, the Wizard of Oz said to himself, “How can I help being a humbug when people expect me to do things that everyone knows can’t be done?”

     Think about it.
     Check out other articles in this series:
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 1: News Reporters" and
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 3: Pastors,"
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 4: Doctors."
or check out the series "How Washington Really Works."

Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 1: News Reporters

     Within the matrix—also known as Plato’s Cave—the world is populated by wondrous, magical beings that exist to perform miracles especially for us. You probably tell yourself that you’re not naïve enough to believe in them; but, to an extent, you probably do. I try not to believe in them; but we all, to an extent, allow our wishes to become father to our thoughts.

     You may have heard the movie definition, “The matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.” The wording of this definition doesn’t tell us who is pulling the wool over our eyes, so we assume that someone else is doing it.

     The “Great Showman,” P. T. Barnum, knew better. Barnum was famously quoted as saying, “The American people love to be humbugged.” Humbugging is a collaborative effort. Whenever we want to have the wool pulled over our eyes, some humbug will sell us the wool for a hefty profit.

     Thus wondrous, magical beings inhabit the matrix world that we mistake for the real world. They include news reporters, politicians, bankers, pastors, doctors, teachers, and many others. Many of them are humbugs; with others, we like to humbug ourselves.

     I've already dealt with bankers as racketeers. In this series of articles, I’ll focus on news reporters, politicians, pastors, doctors, and teachers.  For once, I'll give lawyers a break. 

     In our imaginary world, every reporter is an investigative reporter who is an expert in every area on which he reports, and he has all the time in the world to verify every assertion that comes his way. No one would dare lie to a news reporter. Even if someone were incautious enough to lie to a reporter, the reporter always knows the truth. For all these reasons, we can believe every word of every news report—or so we like to tell ourselves.

     In reality, news reporters are basically like the rest of us. They get the job because they can communicate well enough to be understood most of the time, they’re willing to accept the insultingly low pay that most reporters get, and they’re willing to do such degrading things as sitting through a boring speech from a self-important buffoon while eating pasty instant potatoes and rubbery chicken.

     There’s such a thing as proper news attribution. That’s news reporter lingo for, “I don’t know if what I’m writing is true or not. I’m just telling you what somebody told me.”

     There’s a simple way to disprove the omniscience of news reporters, and it’ll take only five minutes. Take a red pen to the first page of a newspaper and place a red mark under such words as alleged, said, according to, documents show, and all other words indicating that the news reporter isn’t sure if he’s being told the truth. You’ll find yourself underlining more than eighty words and phrases, and the page will look as though it were subjected to lingchi (凌遲)—known to the West as "death by a thousand cuts."

     There’s a saying in the newspaper business that the real news is that somebody said that something is true—not that it really is true. Only investigative reporters can know if it’s true. If you want to know if something is true, you’ll have to research it for yourself. If you research a story and find out that it isn’t true, you haven’t insulted the reporter. On the contrary, you’ve given him another story—if his editor is willing to print it.
      The use of attribution, though, doesn't necessarily mean that reporters are all that committed to accuracy and honesty.  Attribution serves only to protect reporters in the event of lawsuits for libel.
     Let me give you a glaring example.  When Salvadoran leader Roberto D'Aubuisson Arrieta was alive, countless "news" reports said that he "has been linked to right-wing death squads."  So, what was the link, and who did the linking?  Not one of them got into specifics, and it was as if they were singing from the same page of musical arrangement.  The day after D'Aubuisson's death in 1992, the official report in the press said that he "personally ordered the deaths of hundreds" of political opponents.  While it may or may not have been true, no attribution or evidence of any kind was offered for this sudden revelation.  After all, dead men can't sue.

     There’s also the question of bias. All reporters are biased, just as everyone else is biased. Bias is simply another term for frame of reference. Here’s how it works:

     There are far more news stories out there than there are news reporters to cover them. The editor, based on which stories he thinks are the most important, decides which stories are covered and which are ignored.

     When the reporter arrives at the scene, he finds more facts than he could possibly use. Based on what he thinks is important, and what he thinks his editor will think is important, he decides which single fact is the most important, selects the facts that will support that fact—henceforth known as the “main idea” of the story—and ignores all other facts.

     You’re probably familiar with the inverted pyramid style of writing. Supposedly, the most important “who, what, when, where, and possibly how and why” are written first. If you read only the first two paragraphs, you should know the story. The next paragraph supposedly contains less important information, and so on, until the least important information is written last.

     People kid themselves into thinking that the most important fact is in the lead paragraph, and that the story could not have been written any other way. Nothing could be further from the truth. Writers have been known to build their careers on writing articles for which the last paragraphs of news stories were used as the lead paragraphs.

     Below, I have written the last paragraph of a recent news story, reworded in the style of a lead paragraph:

     “International Cooperation Office Director Hsu Min-huei yesterday appeared to suggest that Tibetan officials were lying about the purpose and content of last week’s meeting between Department of Health (DOH) Minister Chiu Wen-ta and Tibetan Health Minister Tsering Wangchuk in Taipei. Hsu said that Chiu’s only intention was to meet former Health Minister Lee Ming-Liang, as Chiu had heard that Lee was in the building and wanted to meet him. Tsering just happened to be at the meeting at the time Chiu was meeting with Lee.”

     That paragraph, by itself, is current, controversial, and of local importance. It makes a more relevant story, in my opinion, than the lead paragraph the newspaper actually used. The newspaper’s lead paragraph was a transparent attempt to use cherry-picked facts to express the newspaper’s editorial slant that government officials of Taiwan (which Beijing says doesn’t exist but threatens to invade anyway) are freely meeting with government officials of Tibet (which Beijing says doesn’t exist but tries to suppress anyway.)

     Just think of what reporters don’t tell you because of their decision to treat one fact as the most important fact, rather than any one of hundreds of other facts.

     In this article, I have dealt only with some of the main aspects of news reporting on which people pull the wool over their own eyes.  Check out the rest of the series:
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 2: Politicians" and 
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 3: Pastors
     "Mythical Beings that Inhabit the Matrix, Part 4: Doctors"
     I intend to post the other articles in this series in the days to come.
     To see other ways that people are fooled by the news media—or fool themselves—see the five-part series “How News Reporting Really Works.”