Scheherazade in the White House (Le Monde article)

time around.

........According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control” (6). Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.

As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement” (7). This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”

Translated by Morag Young

Christian Salmon wrote Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires, La Découverte, Paris, 2007

(1) Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W Bush”, The New York Times, 17 October 2004.

(2) Jay Rosen, “The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind’s Intellectual Scoop”, The Huffington Post, 4 July 2007.

(3) David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger. A Book of Magic, Villard Books, New York, 2002.

(4) Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Penguin Books, New York, 2007.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ira Chernus, “Karl Rove’s Scheherazade Strategy”, Tomdispatch.com, 7 July 2006.

(7) Ibid.
END

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What is it in us or them?

You can fool some of the people all the time.