Sherry Chandler

When I saw this over at Have Coffee Will Write just now, I had to guffaw.

I particularly appreciate that Condi is in the mix:

From the presence of Bill Frist and the amount of hair on Karl Rove’s head, I’d say this one has been making the rounds for a while but I hadn’t seen it.

A day or two ago, Have Coffee Will Write featured this Shankar Vedantam article from the Washington Post on the persistence of myths and urban legends:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

I suppose that’s why I keep getting e-mails telling me Bill Gates is going to pay me for every time I forward the e-mail. As a rule, we don’t seem to think much.

It’s a disquieting article, really, in that it points out the futility of countering popular untruths. I recommend you read it all.

The findings become a bit sinister and frustrating when one applies them to this week’s much cited Vanity Fair piece that may explain why we now have President Bush instead of President Gore. Hint: It was the skewed press coverage:

Eight years ago, in the bastions of the “liberal media” that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as “repellent,” “delusional,” a vote-rigger, a man who “lies like a rug,” “Pinocchio.” Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, “He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy.”

…

How does [Gore] feel about it all? “I feel fine,” he says, “but, when I say that, I’m reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages.” To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, “Isn’t it true that right after the accident, you said, ‘I feel fine’?” The farmer said, “Well, it’s not the simple,” before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, “The patrolman then came to my side and said, ‘How do you feel?’… so I said, ‘I feel fine.’”

A noun for this has entered the lexicon: swiftboating. Gore talks a bit, in the article, about how impossible it was to counter the skewed stories. My favorite bit is a remark from Tipper. I have softened toward Tipper since the days when she tried to censor rock lyrics:

George Bush made it easy—he handed [the press] a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush’s “folksy affability,” “distinctive charm,” “effortless banter,” and the feather pillow that he traveled with.

But Gore couldn’t turn on such charm on cue. “He doesn’t pinch cheeks,” says Tipper. “Al’s not that kind of guy.”

Cheek-pinching looks patronizing to me and how it ever passed for charm is beyond my comprehension. But then I’m that not-as-rare-as-all-that-considering-he-won-the-popular-vote person who’d prefer to have a beer with Al Gore. And would have preferred to drink with Gore to having my cheeks pinched in 2000 or any other year of our Lord you can name.

But I digress. If you want to be really frightened, consider our persistent need to believe in urban legends in conjunction with this little item (via Think Progress) from Robert Draper’s new Bush bio, Dead Certain (never a more apt title):

Bush, for his part, was not disposed to second-guessing. Througout 2006, he read historical texts relating to Lincoln, Churchill, and Truman — three wartime leaders, the latter two of whom left office to something less than public acclaim. History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well. Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs. [p. 388]

My mother always told me to believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

Belief without question is dangerous.