Stripping Bare the Body by mark Danner

“For all the historic resonances, though, one can’t help detecting something different here, a kind of…knowingness, perhaps even an ironic self-awareness, that would have been unthinkable in 1934. FOr we have today leaders who are not only radical in their attitudes toward power and truth, rhetoric and reality, but are occasionally willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly—at least to members of an elite who are thought to have the wit to understand it and to lack the power to do anything about it. In the annals of such frank expressions of the philosophy of power, pride of place must surely be given to this, my favorite quotation of the present age, published in the New York Times Magazine on October 17, 2004, by the writer Ron Suskind, who recounts his discussion with the proverbial ‘unnamed Administration official,’ as follows:
“‘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.’
“These words from ‘Bush’s Brain’—for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind is widely known to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove—sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the ‘reality-based community’—those such as we—are figures a mite pathetic, for all of our adherence to Enlightenment principles and our scurrying after empirical proof proves only that we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.”

-Mark Danner