Do YOU Support Our Troops?

If I was less ADD, I would read a Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan book all the way through. Well, among lots of other books. And blogs. I did make it through Chomsky's 9/11 treatise but that was more of a pamphlet really. The thing I love about him is that he's so level-headed. And because his political analysis is not aligned with religious values or commercial or political interests, he delivers interpretations of events and policies that are in stark opposition to popular media interpretations, and does so in an emotionless and matter-of-fact way. He's not a scaremonger or a shouter or even a conspiracy theorist. In fact his delivery is kind of dry. You'd almost expect him to be Canadian.

And because he's also a linguist, Chomsky is exactly the kind of guy you turn to when all of the magnetic yellow ribbons on Volvos and pickup trucks alike have you scratching your head. Here's an excerpt from a paper entitled "The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda" delivered in Kentfield, CA on March 17, 1991 (during the Gulf War).

"Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? ... In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything. That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for, because nobody knows what it means because it doesn't mean anything, but its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."