Centerfield

Truthers and Truthiness

One of the unfortunate personal consequences of taking a break from blogging, over the last year, seems to be a dramatic deterioration in my ability to write stuff in nice little quick bites. The post you're reading now started as a few observations, but ballooned uncontrollably into a 1,500 word essay. I apologize for the length and understand completely if nobody makes it all the way through.

Visiting a few moderate and centrist blogs, reading a little bit here and there, one of the things that comes through rather clearly is that centrism is a broad-spectrum kind of movement. There isn't a small set of issues, or a limited agenda, that encapsulates what moderates and centrists bring to the table socially and politically. We have views on the issues, along with a detailed interest in policy. But we also have an interest in process, attitude, the culture and norms of political interaction, and a particular interest in drawing lessons from the way regular Americans approach their everyday business and family lives.

I bring this up because I think I've just run across one more way -- one slightly unexpected path -- through which centrists can contribute a little bit to the health and value of the ongoing public debate.

It was something I noticed while doing a little research into a cultural phenomenon currently in the midst of a spectacular growth curve. I was vaguely aware of one or two small parts of it, but I took the opportunity to learn more, just in the last week or so, after a member of my family developed a strong interest in it.

Various labels are put on this internet-fueled movement. The term "Truthers" is sometimes used to describe the folks who believe in this stuff. British author Damian Thompson uses the term "counterknowledge" to describe the movement in a timely book just released on the topic last month.

The most prominent cultural touchstones are a few internet-based movies, including:

• Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist, released on Google video in June 2007 and since viewed (they claim) by over 2 million people.
• Dylan Avery's Loose Change, originally released in 2005 and viewed at least 10 million times on Google video. It was also shown on the History Channel and on a few local network affiliates.
• Aaron Russo's America: Freedom to Fascism, released in 2006 and shown in theatres in a few cities, as well as on Google video.

These films are surprisingly slick, emotionally impactful, and internally compelling. By "internally" I mean to suggest that if you set aside everything you know before watching the film, while also turning off the logical faculty most of us use to make rough impromptu assessments of the plausibility of things, then you will most likely be deeply moved by these films. The narration is smooth, pleasant, and confident. The pacing is steady, and there's a nice use of imagery to focus the attention and organize the material. The graphics and narration work together to effortlessly convey each little element of the story.

I happen to work in the e-learning business, so I spend my days putting together web-based training courses that combine graphics and audio to teach people stuff. The way the producers of these films use those elements is more effective, on the whole, than most of the stuff my company does, and we have hundreds of sharp people working toward that end every day.

These films are also adept in the use of propaganda techniques. The emotional impact of imagery from 9/11 was particularly strong for me. Aside from the usual images we've seen of people falling from buildings, there was an audio piece of a guy who was on the phone in one of the towers, up to and including the moment he was crushed. I haven't been able to get that out of my head. It was truly heartbreaking.

What do these movies tell you? Well, the 9/11 conspiracy is a big piece of it. Zeitgeist and Loose Change both explain how the attacks were really a conspiracy by our own government to give them a pretext for undermining our liberties.

All three films also include the tax fraud and the "international bankers" conspiracy. The tax piece explains the absence of any legal requirement for any of us to pay income taxes. The income tax is unconstitutional, on their reckoning, and in any event it is not required by any actual law. Of course, this theory has been around for a while, and has been thoroughly debunked.

The "international bankers" conspiracy is the broad, all-encompassing one that we're all familiar with. The bankers and the Federal Reserve have controlled every major development in the last couple hundred years of Western history. They started all the wars, kicked off the Great Depression, and found a way to manipulate (and profit from) each significant historical turn.

The most recent of these films, Zeitgeist, breaks new ground by adding a fourth major thread to the conspiracy. It starts with a long segment explaining how religion, and Christianity in particular, has been used as a tool to control us. Jesus did not even exist as a historical person, according to this movie. He was invented by the powers-that-be and used as a tool to prevent us from thinking clearly and asking questions.

If you dip your toes into the portions of the internet where these movies are currently being watched and discussed, you find a vibrant, large-scale, active debate. In terms of numbers, the Truthers seem to have the advantage. The sheer number of folks who watch these things and share with their friends is staggering. The number of new people emailing their friends every day with messages like "Have you seen this? It truly opened my eyes!!!" is apparently quite sizeable. A few months ago, when Rosie O'Donnell started spouting 9/11 conspiracy stuff on The View, it was most likely part of the cultural backwash of this red hot viral internet phenomenon.

Looking at the current online debate, especially the folks taking the time to argue against the Truthers, I get the broad sense that they share some classically centrist qualities. A number of them have this powerful, unshakeable focus on getting the facts straight, along with a basic sense of balance in the way they evaluate information. Sites like Snopes.com attract the sort of folks who want to know the bottom line and are determined not to be spun. They're pretty busy dealing with the influx of Truthers over there.

Of course, these aren't qualities we can ascribe to centrism in any sort of exclusive fashion. There are folks on the left and right who are reasonably tough-minded and fact-based in their basic approach to the world around us. A blog called Screw Loose Change was started by two Republicans who engage in daily debate with the Truthers, while the site Debunking911.com was started by a liberal who wants to clearly document why these conspiracy theories aren't true. The funniest piece written by a skeptic was the one by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, complete with a purported script by the 9/11 conspirators.

In this, there seems to be a drive that flows right along the empirical lanes we centrists tend to travel. Let's figure out what's really happening in the world around us first, regardless of who gains or loses from that assessment. Let's not walk around with alternate sets of simple facts about the world, particularly if those facts can be checked.

Of course, the concept of "truthiness" was recently developed by a prominent liberal, Stephen Colbert, as a critique of guys like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, who seem to derive their sense of what's real from "gut feelings" and are rather adept at sweeping aside inconvenient facts.

Moving the "truthiness" concept into this debate would seem perfectly appropriate, both linguistically and logically. If we begin to sweep in the bogus theories on the left, like conspiracies that claim George Bush planned 9/11, we may someday end up with a concept of "truthiness" that helps weed out the gross factual inaccuracies on both sides of the aisle.

It seems to me, with a mass phenomenon like the Truthers currently underway, that centrists can make a contribution by helping to tug these folks back to some semblance of reality, while giving a boost to those segments of the left, right, and middle who want to build real standards of factual accuracy into the public debate.