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.''
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Interesting article. The concept of the "reality-based" community is a telling one. Those who 'spin' reality will always be concocting their lies one, or many, steps ahead of those who seek to find the 'truth'. In such a world, in fact, the terms "truth" and "lies" become things that must be put in semi-sarcastic quotation marks, when referring to factual expression of worldview. Because, rather than the culture being a solid entity, or even a persistent facade, it's an ever-shedding skin, textured for the day and the means thereof. There's no animal beneath, to present a rhetorical target. A 'Pink Elephant' is an apt analogy.
