Welcome to the Summer of Corruption

Birth of a Meme: Welcome to the Summer of Corruption; By Steve McNally
Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 in part by talking endlessly about the Republican “Culture of Corruption,” a meme the mainstream media and the liberal blogosphere were only too happy to pick up and run with to the point that it became engrained in the culture; a Google search brings up 16,300,000 results for the phrase (after filtering out references to “Malkin”and thus Michelle’s new book “Culture of Corruption: [1] Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies” [2]).

The original phrase was supposedly fed to journalists and bloggers by Howard Dean in the summer of 2005 as he tried to drive allegations of Karl Rove’s involvement in the alleged outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and he regurgitated it later in the year while talking about accusations of irregular stock trading involving Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. But the meme really took hold after Nancy Pelosi repeated it the following September in response to the indictment of then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on ethics charges.

What do the Rove, Frist and DeLay cases have in common? None of the three has ever been tried, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. But therein lies the beauty of a meme [3]: it’s just an idea. It doesn’t have to have any basis in fact. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It just has to be created, and then be picked up by commentators and pundits and repeated by rote until it takes on a life of its own; memes are self-replicating [4].

The origins of the word lie in the Greek mɪmetɪsmos, meaning “something imitated.” Thus, for the ‘culture of corruption’ meme to take hold in the media in 2005 and 2006, no scrutiny of the accuracy or veracity of Democrat claims was required; reporters and anchors didn’t even have to ask, or even understand, what the phrase referred to. It was, linguistically speaking, a self-referent (compared to “Culture of Corruption,” “‘Bush lied, people died” was positively polysemous).

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Just wind up your meme and off it goes. I came up with a little meme of my own this afternoon, while watching the breaking news concerning an ethics investigation of Democrat representative Maxine Waters. This on top of Charlie Rangel, and Rod Blagojevich… All during what the Obama administration is laughably calling the “Summer of Recovery” (a slogan that hasn’t achieved meme status; it’s more of an unintentional trope [5]).

Anyway, it all came together… A “Summer of Recovery” twist on “Culture of Corruption…”‘Summer of Corruption!” Brilliant! Alas, when I Googled the phrase I found that I’d been beaten to the punch: 6,580,000 times, according to the search results. ”Summer of Corruption” was the subtitle of a Stephen King novella entitled Apt Pupil published in 1992, and also the name of a 2008 tour by Massachusetts metalcore band “Hell Within.” After refining my search I still came up with 3,000,000 results, and on a cursory observation of the first few pages most of them seemed to be referring to Charlie Rangel and also referenced Michelle Malkin. It turns out that the phrase was first used by her in a June 2 blog post [6] about the Blagojevich trial and the Joe Sestak pay-not-to-play allegations, and as further Democrat shenanigans have come to light, “Summer of Corruption” has become a recurring segment on her site.

I haven’t visited Michelle’s site for a few months, but still, why hadn’t I heard the phrase before? I’m an avid consumer of Fox News, talk radio and numerous conservative and libertarian blogs and websites, and I subscribe to numerous email alerts and newsletters. One would think that at least one of them would have picked up on Michelle’s brilliantly simple slogan. As we’ve seen recently with JournoList, the left are certainly not averse to collaborating on getting their message out; on the contrary, they are rigidly disciplined in doing so. Long before Andrew Breitbart and the Daily Caller came up with the hard evidence, anyone who had heard one of Rush Limbaugh’s montages of multiple media personalities parroting the same liberal talking point would have already known only too well the extent of the collusion that was afoot. But, whether it’s the innately individualistic and competitive nature of conservatism, or simply the fact that those of us on the right actually have our own original thoughts, lock-step messaging is just not something that’s in our playbook, much as the left would like to believe otherwise (How’s “Right Wing noise machine” for an inherently meaningless, classically self-referential gem of a meme?)

Obviously the mainstream media aren’t going to give any airtime to Michelle’s catchy conservative slogan, lest it have the same impact on the Democrats in November that “Culture of Corruption” did on Republicans four years ago. And in any case, much as part of me would like to see the idea of a ‘Summer of Corruption’ take hold across the media, I adhere to the (Groucho) Marxian principle of not wanting to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member. We don’t want to rely on the mainstream media to get our talking points about Democrat corruption out to the voters, and we shouldn’t need to; the facts of each individual case are damning enough to speak for themselves. Let’s just wait for Blagojevich, Rangel and the others to be convicted. I’d like to see the media try to avoid covering that.


http://bigjournalism.com/smcnally/2010/08/07/biuth-of-a-meme-welcome-to-the-summer-of-corruption/