Deception as a National Pastime

Last week a new study showed over half of medical doctors use placebos on a regular basis.
Having worked with medical doctors and nurses for years, I wasn't exactly surprised. I'd heard the story a hundred times: patient comes to see doc, patient doesn't feel well, doc sees no signs of serious illness but knows patient won't feel satisfied if s/he walks away empty-handed. Caught in an ethical bind doc prescribes something innocuous.

Studies show not only that placebos are effective (and cheap!) but also more expensive placebos work better than cheap ones and dark-colored placebos work better than white ones. Go figure!

Docs usually frame it along these lines: "I'm going to give you something not usually prescribed for this but I think it will help." As dishonest as this is, it seems to me like a healthy way to harvest the power of the mind to help the body heal without using unnecessary chemicals.

But according to a NY Times article: "The American Medical Association discourages the use of placebos by doctors when represented as helpful", stating it might undermine trust.

This notion of trust and people in powerful positions got me thinking about my own life.

Before working as a therapist I worked as a journalist and occasionally as a copywriter. Basically I sold my writing skills to big corporations. The job was simple: find all the positives about a product or service and omit all the negatives. Here in America it's our national sport. We call it marketing when we're happy, spin when we're angry. Students come from all over the world to study business and learn "le marketing." It's what we do.

And yet, it's still dishonest.

In my neighborhood hangs a poster with a 1950's sepia photo of a Latina-looking woman holding a babe in her arms. The tagline reads: "Because if I graduate it's like a part of her is making it too." Naively I thought this was an ad for a foundation offering scholarships for under-served populations. Then one day I bent down and read the fine print at the bottom: it's an ad for the US Navy.

Here's an example of the marketing that Defense creates with our tax dollars in times of war. It's dishonest. But somewhere there's a study and a focus group that showed that this dishonest approach would get people in a uniform.

Maybe it's just me but when I think about it I realize the list of subtle, socially-sanctioned lies is pervasive in my life from headlines to credit card mailers, from church pulpits to the White House.
Here are just a few of the recent examples that come to mind:

• "Yes, you can own with no money down..."
• Insurance companies refusing to pay up when you arrive with your claim.
• Axis of evil
• Sex-craved evangelical millionaires swearing they're pious.
• Not-to-be-beat mortgages for poor people.
• Weapons of Mass Destruction.
• "Sand-swept beach with an unobstructed view..."
• Political-favor-style home renovations.
• "This isn't about homophobia, it's about protecting our children".
• "This tax stimulus will turn things around".
• "We want to help working class people".
• Finally The Real Truth about Brad and Jen

And the list goes on and on...

I'm exhausted. I'm tired of being lied to. I'm tired of being given political and corporate Vicodin when all I'm really getting is sugar pills.

And of course spokespersons, politicians and CEO's spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants who train and rehearse them so that they can tell us these lies in believable ways, without their body language betraying them. It's called 'effective communication skills'.

We know why people lie: because they benefit from it somehow. Power and profit tend to be the two big motors behind dishonest representation.

According to the OECD, a non-profit social and economic observatory that we belong to with 29 other relatively rich countries, our wealth gap has widened considerably since the beginning of the Bush administration. Today, of the 30 member countries, only Mexico and Turkey have a wider wealth gap than ours. A stagnant middle income and a rampant upper income has made it so that seventy-one percent of the wealth belongs to the top 10% of the population.

Clearly the lying has helped some people.

And that feeling of being manipulated by leaders who are way too close to those with money and only seem to be working to sustain one another has been pervasive.

It will be interesting to see how those alliances will shift now that the party has been seriously crashed by a recession that will not speak its name.

In a recent article the ex-Nixon speech writer/investor/actor/pro-lifer Ben Stein wrote about a talk he gave to disgruntled investors in comfy La Jolla, California. He finished by asking just whose side the government is on.

Funny I've been asking myself that for years...or more precisely: "When will I live under a government which I feel is on my side?"

One of the many things that gives me hope is, in my experience working with hundreds of people, most folks educated or not figure out when they're being lied to. It may take them time to figure it out...but they do.

I believe people's lie-fatigue is an important part of what's driving their choices in the many electoral races today.

On the art of fear-mongering (and the usefulness thereof)

Imagine you have a four year old son who calls you into his room at 1AM. He's afraid because he's quite sure there's someone under his bed. He heard a noise and he's convinced it's someone out to get him. You know that just a few weeks ago one of his classmates' house was robbed. But rather than reassuring your son you look at him and say, "Oh yes there's probably somebody under the bed. There are scary people all over and they really want to hurt us."

Sick, huh?

Yet that's precisely the kind of fathering that George Bush did to the country after the Sept 11 attacks, a tragedy most people consider the biggest historical turning point in the last 100 years.

In essence he said - "Yes people you should be afraid. They are legion. They are everywhere. And they are out to get us." Then he presented us with information demonstrating to us that he was right. He alternated this with "We are strong, we are good and we will win" messages without going into too much detail about how that would happen or even what win means.

In his 2003 State of the Union address Mr Bush used this tactic beautifully. He spends twenty nine paragraphs talking about his four main goals: creating a stronger economy, reducing dependence on foreign oil, bringing affordable healthcare to every American and creating more compassionate volunteer initiatives across the country, particularly for people with addictions.

(Hey those are pretty good ideas George!! Too bad you lost focus there, huh?)

But then Bush spent 39 paragraphs going into incredible detail about the the lurking evil that just may get us any day now, alternating this with mentions of our patriotic omnipotence that will prevail.

Why would a man spend so much energy telling the little boy, "Yep there's a shitload of Indians under the bed dying to scalp you - you should be scared"?

I believe one of the best reasons to be using and abusing fearful messages when one happens to be standing at the national pulpit is because it paralyzes people. When we are afraid we pull in, we shut down and we don't know where to turn or who to run to.

It's also a great way to sell a solution-based idea. This is the technique used by the wonderful life insurance companies who offer us maudlin photos of widowers and their children all dressed in black. The baseline reads something like "What would they do without you?"

Well we know what Bush wanted to sell us. He wanted to sell us a war that had nothing to do with September 11th. The more he repeated "Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein" alongside the fearful messages, the more the paralyzed masses readied themselves for an invasion.

Why am I bringing up all of this now?

Because John McCain comes from the same school and uses the same tactics. When asked about the war in Iraq he said "If we leave Iraq, they are going to follow us home."

Quite frankly I'm tired of this kind of jabber. I'm tired of black and white thinking.

We never just saved the world for democracy. And we rarely have just altruistic reasons behind our foreign policies. We have taken down democratically elected officials who we didn't like and have supported others in taking power in very non-democratic ways. We have murdered people rather than sending them to trial, a notion we normally sort of like to defend as American.

"They" are not all evil and "we" are not all good.

Doesn't America deserve a leader who doesn't infantilize her citizens? Isn't it time we stopped electing people who keep pulling out the boogey-man as a manipulative oratorical tool and instead focus on simple comprehensible solutions to real problems and a clear explanation of how to pay for them?

When I lived in Europe we all knew very clearly that there were a certain number of things that changed when a terrorist alert was high. Overnight all of the public wastebaskets were sealed shut. Packages over a certain weight had to be taken into the post office and scanned. Sensitive buildings were suddenly surrounded by national police.

Why didn't this happen in America? Besides the domestic airlines beefing up security, nothing much has changed in my life. (Oh yes, there is the way it has affected my jokes in Texas: at the Bush International Airport a mechanical voice reminds you every ten minutes or so that even your jokes may be taken as threats.)

And of course in the last few days Mr McCain is now closing the loop. Not only is the scarey boogey man of undefined terror just waiting to get us but members of his team are now more or less subtly frightening folks by insisting that Obama is a "they" (Muslim, terrorist, wonk) and not an "us" (Christian, patriot, willing to save the world for democracy).

"Yep - you better cry little boy - there are evil boogey men just under your bed and they are waiting for the opportunity to slit your throat. But you can trust me...."

The "S" Word

When I moved back to America after being away for an extended period I discovered there was a word that couldn't be said. A friend of mine was telling me a racist story about how she had seen one man call another man "The 'N' word." "You mean nigger?" I asked. She acquiesced with a nod.

I have mixed feelings about making a word unspeakable --much like Harry Potter's nemesis, the One Who Can't Be Named-- but I must admit that I never liked the word much and I won't really miss it. Besides, I get to hear it over and over again in the streets since it's now the young black equivalent of 'dude'.

But I noticed there is another word that has become almost unpronounceable in America today: socialism. It's nearly taboo. It's okay to use it as an insult as in an email I saw go by recently in which Obama was described as a "socialist Muslim". Even folks on the left in America talk about socialists as if they were all extreme radicals who can't be taken seriously. So let's just call it the "S word" and not ruffle any feathers.

This notion is funny to me since most of my friends in France and throughout Europe are members of a socialist party. My old friends Marcia and Fabrice, both high-level advertising execs with two cars, a large flat in Paris overflowing with contemporary art, a weekend home in Champagne and a summer home in Morocco: both socialists.
Or Pierre, a self made multi-millionaire business consultant to large euro-corporations with a chateau in Bordeaux and a house in Saint Martin. Also a socialist (but more of the ecological leaning).
And then there's Martine, a free-lance copywriter mom who scratches out marketing documents and web copy for most of France's Forbes 100. Dyed in the wool socialist.

So what makes these otherwise pro-business folks belong to the Socialist Party and vote socialist in elections? My guess is the common denominator is they believe that the role of government is to offer humane services to its citizens, such as health care, a quality education, childcare and social services for the poor and the marginalized (which, by the way, have a direct impact on lowering crime rates). And they are perfectly willing to have part of their income be taxed every month to pay for these services. In France the individual income tax rates vary from 10% to 48%, in the US they are 15% to 35%.

What amazes me about the die-hard, turbo-capitalists that the US pumps out is that they are actually fond of socialism when it suits them.

Take for instance the many wealthy Americans who own summer houses in France or a flat in Paris (ask Mr Forbes about that). At fancy cocktail parties, one can hear them comment on how beautiful the public parks are, how clean and safe the streets, how nice it is to have decent on-time trains. The notion that we could have all those things in the US, arguably the wealthiest country in the world, never seems to cross their mind.

Closer to home there are Reaganomics fans like George Bush II who after what is considered one of the most tragic moments in modern American history, decided to nationalize airport security. Isn't he one of the defend-til-you-die folks behind the idea that anything government does is wastefully done? The same George Bush who increased steel tariffs to save jobs in the Rust Belt?
Can you say "market intervention"?

The US hypocritically screams at the Europeans for unashamedly subsidizing EADS, maker of Airbus, yet finds all kinds of ways to slip money to Boeing and friends. People I know at Boeing say they consider themselves civil servants. And when Airbus recently won a huge contract in a competitive bid against Boeing, Washington insiders yelled foul play long enough to have the contract renegotiated. Agriculture, cruise ships, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, KBR, Halliburton, tax loopholes for corporations and the list goes on.

The recent $700 billion gesture of kindness that the US government is considering making to the finance industry (after Fannie and Freddie, AIG, etc) isn't socialism of course. Nationalizing banks is what socialists do, just ask our neighbor Hugo. Real, balls-out capitalists stand by the power of the market at all costs and... may the best man win. This is just a 're-adjustment'.

My guess is there are several reasons why it is nearly impossible to take all these subsidies and funnel them into programs that might bring America better schools, cleaner parks, free higher education and health care for all.

1 - The pull yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps blind idealism that says we can all become a rags to riches entrepreneur if we just keep trying hard enough (A shame-based approach which also enhances disdain for poor people).
2 - The fact that non-rich people rarely get elected to national office (Imagine that in many countries there are actually teachers, postal carriers and farmers getting elected to parliaments).
3 - Rich people want to be able to choose where their social giving goes and don't want their money being mixed with everyone else's. (Plus it allows them to have a wing of a hospital with their name on it.)
4 - In America, 'poor' is often a code word for people of color and deep rooted racism keeps the white middle class majority from wanting to help them.

I contend that, with our capacity for innovation, pragmatism and entrepreneurship we could create the most exciting social programs in the world to give our kids quality education, to create outstanding public transportation, to invent new forms of health care delivery. If we wanted to, we could do an American version of socialism without all of the old communist-infused baggage that many European countries lug around: inflexible labor unions, grandfathered civil servant positions, entrenched us-and-them mentalities.

We would just have to call it something other than socialism.

An American Addiction: ahh the rush of it all!!!

Reading about Palin made me want to share some of my recent thoughts about the upcoming elections. I am aware that I stand to the left of most of America - and apparently most of California since we elected Arnold.
Twice!
I get tired of living in the minority and am shocked at some of the dog eat dog policies that come out of administrations that the majority elect. But being in the minority sometimes is part of democracy.
Even though I legally can live abroad - I choose not to leave the country. I think the main reason I stay here is that I feel like I am in the midst of a giant social experiment. I feel like we as a people are constantly trying to figure out who we are and how we want to be together -- usually in very bold, creative ways.

I've often entertained the idea that if only we had a leader who would take the time to explain complex concepts to mainstream America, rather than spouting ad slogans at them, that the majority would understand they are being economically shafted by the right and vote for the left.

I thought I saw that person in Obama.

For a long time I didn't understand why people watch Judge Judy or Springer - how they got pleasure out of seeing someone berate someone else willingly on TV.

I understood why gay men would walk around like uber-Hulks after decades of oppression but didn't really understand why when I went to Disneyland I saw legions of straight men dressed like tatooed soldiers and driving Hummers.

I didn't understand why in 20 years living in France I never got physically attacked by another person and within the first three months of living back in the US I was called a "Faggot" by a stranger in the street and had a gun held to my head by another - in a tony white neighborhood!

Today my theory is that we, as a people, are really addicted to drama, to adrenaline, to the rush. We love it when the stakes are high. We sell blockbuster killer movies, Grand Theft Auto software and amusement park thrill rides to the entire world. In this addiction there is a salient need for immediacy and little room for thought.

Our foreign policy has been one of "cleaning up the mess" - the Marines, the SWAT team, the COPS Show of the world. We're the bold ones who step in when every other country is sitting around talking policy.

The fact this this approach often serves our expansionist economic and political needs is no secret.

We do have incredibly innovative non-profits doing really interesting work around the world but they rarely make the news. And our government investment in international aid is peanuts compared to many European countries.

In this Pull-yourself-up by-the-bootstraps nation it would stand to reason that most folks in America thus equate "talking policy" to being wimpy, to not being strong. A "war hero"
trumps a university professor. A millionaire wins out over a community organizer ("Just what the hell is that anyway, Myrna?"). A feisty soccer mom with a forked tongue and a rags to riches frontiersman facade wins out over a college educated wonk.

The same goes for"wimpy" instutions: a national health care system that might lose money or public transportation that might need subsidies every year is a proof of failure. But bailing out the oh-so-ballsy mortgage companies is just a tweak in a strong economic policy!

Finally - destructive acts and words are far more stimulating to us than those that build consensus. We did a fair job taking out Hussein but aren't very good at keeping our A.D.D.-riddled national attention on nation-building. We get a much bigger rush out of zinger insults than we do out of interesting conversation - to such a point that our talking heads even cross ethical lines from time to time (Right Mr Imus?). Our prime time focus is on voting people off the island. What kind of reality show would actually show people working together?

There have been some really interesting articles about the construction of heterosexual masculine identity in America and mostly about how it's focused on "Not being a fag". But interestingly studies show straight guys aren't just defending against appearing attracted to the same sex - they are defending against any kind of behavior that may be perceived as soft, gentle, caring or emotional.

And these same guys are running many American institutions: shut down turbo-thugs with suits.

I remember years ago talking with NGO friends who had just spent all day at a UN-sponsored negotiation table in Geneva to bring AIDS meds to Africa. The big player at the table was the US which had recently earmarked a new budget for this. My buddies from all over the world told me of the meager gains they had made in the negotiation. When I asked why, they responded: "Because the Americans are sharks! They're very cunning and they run their administration like a corporation."

It seems to me that we are really at a moment in our history when we get to choose a different way of being in the world. I'm not sure that the majority of Americans are ready for such a big change - I'm not sure anymore if Obama is ready to personify that change.

I yearn for a president who has the balls to say "I don't know", "Let's do the long difficult alliance-building work rather than the rushing in", "Let's turn half of our military into the peace corps - and then send them to the 20% of America who lives below the poverty level."

I'm hoping Obama is that man.