Scott McClellan is having a "Matrix" moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dream world to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact.
In "The Matrix," Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap.
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he says, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard's pronouncement, in his book "Simulations," that we live in a "desert of the real" -- an ever more virtual reality where fact and firsthand experience are displaced by media fictions. Baudrillard's example is tailor-made for the Bush presidency: "Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies," he wrote.
This, in a word, is life in the Bush administration's Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in his frag 'em-and-run memoir. The former White House press secretary -- whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was "Matrix" -- recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in a "permanent campaign," a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were "the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin," and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.
Now that McClellan has broken free from what he calls the "Washington bubble," he can see the "massive marketing campaign" to sell the war in Iraq for the steaming heap of dookie it was: a public relations operation characterized by an, er, "lack of candor and honesty," as the author so masterfully understates it.
Of course, McClellan knows perfectly well that "shaping the narrative before it shapes you" is how you win hearts and minds (and, not incidentally, sell books). Watching McClellan stay relentlessly on message as he makes the talk-show rounds, one can't help but wonder: Is the man still spinning? The White House and its flying monkeys in the right-wing blogosphere and at Fox News think so. They've launched a counterspin offensive, Richard Clarke-ing him as a prevaricator who will do anything to boost his sales. (No. 1 on Amazon as we speak.)
