Mobil, Bush, and the Empire of Faith

I was re-reading Ron Suskind's notorious NY Times Magazine article from last October, about the Bush administration and its "faith based," rather than "reality based" way of approaching the world, and why the Bushies feel that gives them the high ground. The money passage is excerpted here:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

What's interesting to me is that the unnamed "senior advisor to Bush" makes the same case--in almost exactly the same language, even, if you ignore the quasitheological spin--that a top-brass fellow from Mobil made, in a different context, back in the early 1980s. I'd attended an academic panel in which several colleagues talked--none too kindly--about Mobil's corporate advocacy strategies (which at the time involved such shocking and hitherto unprecedented tactics as "op ed" pieces in the Times and extended "Fables for Our Times" during "Masterpiece Theatre" on PBS.) The fellow from Mobil's name escapes me these long years later, but his point (delivered in an almost neighborly tone when he joined several of us for a post-panel luncheon) has stuck with me: "We're a moving target. Write about us all you want. By the time you write about us doing X, we've moved on to doing Y."

There are several layers here: One is that there a lot of people out there who continue to believe in the gap between those who "act" (Big Oil, the Bush conservatives) and those who merely "study" those who act (academics, the "liberal media"). A second layer is that American anti-intellectualism--and the quintessentially Bushian strain that flourishes today--lives for and exploits that gap. Probably someone with a little determination and two different colored highlighters could overlay a Red State/Blue State reading on all that, as well.

I'm not a big believer in the whole Red State/Blue State dichotomy; I don't think it's shown anything that matters, or that lasts (can I be the only one who still remembers the Barry Goldwater 1964 TV ad that fantasized about a giant handsaw separating Florida from the rest of the US?) I think the popular and electoral college numbers from 2004 are too slim to constitute the sort of seismic shift Karl Rove hopes for. And yet, there's something there . . . . It may not squarely overlay electoral politics, but it's . . . something.