Ron Suskind, New York Times, October 17, 2004:
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.“
For years I’ve seen this viewpoint (Rove’s?) as arrogant, and at odds with my own take on enlightenment principles and empiricism, but today, comparing the coverage multiple news outlets gave to the UN Security Council’s voting down the US attempt to extend the Iran arms embargo, I started to wonder if it might not be in fact entirely accurate. New York Times and Los Angeles Times articles are so radically different from those in Spiegel, Die Zeit, the Guardian, that they might as well be from different worlds, or from different, dare I say it, realities.
The Guardian quotes Richard Gowan, at the International Crisis Group, as saying at the Security Council „there will be two realities“ with regard to an Iran arms embargo: one which is shared by the US and the Dominican Republic, the other shared by the rest of the world. In the view of US media, however, there is the US perspective and then there is that of those who are nuts (New York Times), or who lack courage (Los Angeles Times).
What must it be like to be an employee at CIA, DoD, NSA, regularly read international news in several languages, and overhear the conversation of civic-minded Americans whose window on the world is limited to the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC? How would you avoid feeling a deep sense of superiority, an easy feeling of contempt for fellow citizens so obviously unequipped to take part in decisions regarding national security? Would you even have fellow citizens, or would you instead see yourself as member of a priestly caste? How could you permit yourself to feel subject to the laws of the lower orders?