I enjoy reading books about physics. I don’t pretend to clearly understand all of the paradoxes that have been introduced into modern physics, but I feel that, at least while I’m reading about them, I can sidle up to a sort of understanding. We are not hard wired to understand these things, so they’re counterintuitive. Schrödinger tells us that the cat is neither dead nor alive until we open the box.. Light consists of both particles and waves, depending on the circumstances. The Firesign Theater tells us you can’t be in two places at once, but physics says that a particle can, in fact, be in two places at once. Heisenberg teaches us that we can’t speak with certainty about a particle’s position unless we give up all hope of measuring its velocity. The mind reels. In the case of the cat, any statement we make about its viability is both true and untrue, until we open the box.
Most scientists would likely say that these paradoxes have no application to the world of politics. In fact, more than one book of science that I have read cautions against trying to apply concepts like the uncertainty principle to other intellectual disciplines. Consider the postmodern theorists who have attempted to employ relativity theory and other scientific concepts in support of their notions about objective truth.
Where the postmodernists have failed, the Bush propaganda machine appears to have succeeded brilliantly. The Bushies may disdain science, but they know a good thing when they see it. What better propaganda tool than a word or phrase that is both true and false at that same time, or that at one and the same times asserts one thing while simultaneously denying that very thing. Consider the newly announced policy of the Bush Administration to set a “time horizon” for meeting “aspirational goals in Iraq”.
First, consider the phrase in isolation. It sounds like it means the same as a “timeline”, and in fact, it does appear to imply a fixed date by which a particular defined event will take place. The media and most observers have seized on the phrase to conclude that Bush has agreed to a timeline, at least in principle.
Maybe he has.
But, consider the cat. Maybe he hasn’t, for like Humpty Dumpty, both the Bush folks and John McCain can and have insisted that a word means what they choose it to mean, and at the moment the phrase, according to them, does not mean timeline.
But then again, maybe it does. Or maybe it will.
Until Bush decides to open the box, he has either agreed to a timeline or he has not. In fact, he has both agreed to a timeline and not agreed to a timeline, just as the cat is both dead and alive. Bush’s puppet masters can literally have it both ways, and who can gainsay them? Once the box is opened, and all the possibilities have collapsed into one, we will know what the phrase has come to mean, but until that date, if it ever arrives, the phrase exists in a the same eerie world as Schrödinger’s hapless feline.
We can only hope the “time horizon” collapses into a “timeline”, but be wary. The choice of the phrase “time horizon” fills me with a sense of foreboding. In my experience, no matter how far you travel, the horizon always appears to be just as far away as it was when you started. If the Bush-McCain time horizon works the same way, we’re in trouble.
