Quotessence
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Mark Crispin Miller

Mark Crispin Miller Books

Professor

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“Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying. ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or -- especially -- compassion.”

“Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. Its aim is to jolt us, not "into thinking," as in a Brechtian formulation, but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action: "To us," as an executive at Coca-Cola puts it, "communication is message assimilation--the respondent must be shown to behave in some way that proves they [sic] have come to accept the message, not merely to have received it.”