Memetic Market Watch: "Insurgent sympathizer"

Ever since I first encountered the phrase in a California appeals court decision extending the journalistic "shield law" protection to web-based editors and journalists, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of a "memetic marketplace."

It's an obvious play off the old economic metaphor of the "marketplace of ideas," carrying with it a preference for "lassaiz faire" handling of speech and expression, suggesting that in an "unregulated" or "deregulated" market, the best ideas will naturally prosper. Of course, people who use the phrase aren't always really interested in "unregulated traffic" in ideas--at least not in ideas they're not in favor of--any more than big corporations really want "competition" when they ask for their industries to be deregulated. But that's not a problem with the metaphor--it just means it's as nuanced and layered as the object of comparison itself (in this case, market places), which is what a metaphor should be doing.

And if "memetic marketplace" eventually edges out "marketplace of ideas" in our conversational lexicon, it will probably represent a triumph of advertising and marketing (the natural home of the "mind virus" aka the meme) over old-fangled principles like rhetoric and critical thinking. But the economic metaphor, significantly, would remain.

Still, metaphors have consequences; they suggest and urge courses of action, and they implicitly prioritize some values over others (the more powerfully so, often, to the extent that they stay implicit).

So let's take the "marketplace" metaphor and run with it.

What's happening in the Memetic Marketplace today?

IPO: "Insurgent sympathizer," in media coverage of the Iraq (civil) war, refers to Iraqis whose charges of misconduct against US military personnel may be dismissed as unsubstantiated, owing to personal animus against the military and/or personal connection to the victims of such misconduct. For example:

General Formica said there was no physical or medical evidence to substantiate allegations by several members of an Iraqi family that American interrogators at Abu Ghraib in December 2003 had beaten and slapped them, and then sodomized them with a water bottle. In addition, he said, the family members were known to be insurgent sympathizers.

Value: The value of this meme, as Digby points out, is that it allows pro-war sources to dimiss and discredit accounts of abuse by the US military by characterizing witnesses, with or without evidence, as unreliable because of their hostility to America. And the term is sufficiently elastic that it can be used, ex post facto, to justify anything done to any Iraqi citizen:

Indeed, anyone who is related to an insurgent or even knows one --- little kids especially --- can be seen as soft on insurgency when they cling to their mothers and fathers begging for their lives. The rules of engagement being what they are, apparently, killing these insurgent sympathizers is a-ok.

Forecast: Bullish. I predict we'll hear this idea getting bounced around a lot more frequently in the coming months.

Since the Bush administration and the Republican congress have publicly commited themselves to keeping American military forces in Iraq at least through 2008, in the continued absence of any plan, the increased Sunni/Shiia violence, as well as the violence directed toward our own occupying forces, will create a need to explain and justify the continuing bombings, assassinations, etc. without admitting that Bush policy has anything to do with it. Introducing a new actor onto the stage--the "Insurgent sympathizer"--will provide a convenient scapegoat.

The p3 recommendation: Buy!