MemeMachineGo!

I’ve been reading Skimble lately.

Laura Bush had scheduled a symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” at the White House. She cancelled it when one of the invitees, Sam Hamill, took exception to the idea of associating with the Bush White House and instead began organizing a war protest anthology. One invitee, Roger Kimball, got all huffy about Hamill’s spoiling his invite to the White House. Skimble writes :

The United States is a country, not a country club. But Roger Kimball is just a caddie on the manicured fairway of Laura Bush’s stunted cultural imagination.

Dude can turn a phrase (said with awareness that I don’t recall anything establishing his or her sex.)

Elsewhere, Skimble quotes Goering

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I [Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist] pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

And to measure the underreporting of theft, Skimble invented the smoke and mirrors index :

The Smoke & Mirrors Index is Skimble’s measure of ill-gotten money divided by Google hits. If I stole $1,000 and got 10 Google hits, my Smoke & Mirrors Index would be 100, equal to $100 per Google hit. If you stole $100 and got 20 Google hits, your Smoke & Mirrors Index would be 5, or $5 per Google hit. I stole more money than you but fewer people are talking about it, so the smoke and mirrors are in my favor — distracting the world from my self-enriching crime. Bad guys score high; (relatively) good guys score low. In other words, the higher someone’s Smoke & Mirrors Index, the more they are getting away with. The less scrutiny there is about great financial crimes, the higher the S&M Index. The more scrutiny there is about smaller crimes, the lower the S&M index.

Read it.