otherwise

How to Lie with Maps (second edition) by Mark Monmonier
A map must inherently lie to some degree because it can never
completely represent the reality of the terrain it is purporting to show.
But a lot of maps lie more than they need to, and sometimes they lie
for specific reasons, whether an unconscious bias or a
Machiavellian manipulation. They aren’t as obvious as newspaper
articles or corporate press releases, but maps are another tool in the
arsenal of propagandists. In this updated version of the classic book
on the subject, a distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse
looks at the myriad ways maps mislead.
Scale, symbols, projection, shading, color, simplification, smoothing,
and many other aspects of maps can intentionally or unintentionally
cause problems. Maps in advertisements can make a store or off i c e
look as conveniently located and easy-to-find as possible. Maps are
often used for manipulation in city/regional planning, giving the illusion
that a proposed project wouldn’t negatively affect its surroundings.
Two possible ways to use a map for political purposes are to
display certain countries/areas as part of another country or at least
as a disputed territory, and to use bold arrows to “dramatize an attack
across a border, exaggerate a concentration of troops, and perhaps
even justify a ‘pre-emptive strike.’” Epidemiological maps showing
clusters of illnesses can be partitioned in various ways to inflate or
minimize the appearance of a pandemic. Color is an emotionally
manipulative tool, and features that a cartographer wants you to like
may be colored blue or red, while features you’re not supposed to
like may be in a displeasing hue, such as orange or greenish-yellow.
Politricks
If you look strictly at black men of
college age (18 to 24),
you’ll find that almost three times
as many are in college as are in prison.
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American
President by J.H. Hatfield
Fortunate Son, a biography/exposé of George W. Bush, was originally
published by St. Martin’s Press, a large corporate publisher, in
October 1999. Its most controversial part was its afterword, which,
based on three unnamed sources, said that Shrub “had been arrested
for cocaine possession in 1972 but had his record expunged
after his father arranged for him to perform community service.”
Almost 90,000 copies had been shipped to
bookstores when St. Martin’s made the
almost unheard-of move of recalling the book
and turning it into “furnace fodder,” to quote
the company’s own press release. Luckily,
whatever scared the shit out of that corporate
publishing house so badly that they burned their own book, it didn’t
rattle Soft Skull Press. A highly independent publisher, Soft Skull
saw to it that not only was the book republished, but their edition
includes even more damaging information than the original.
Now you can read all about the allegations of coke use, Shrub’s
arrests during his Yale days, his defense of branding pledges at the
fraternity that he headed, getting out of service in Vietnam, his disastrous
oil business, his born-again conversion, his role as hatchet man
in his father’s presidential campaigns, his engineering of a sweet government
deal for a small oil company that hired him as a “consultant,”
his fishy stock selling, his gubernatorial campaign against A n n
Richards, his real record as governor, his earnings of almost $15 million
on a $606,000 investment, his penchant for executing people, his
shaky record on crime, his allegiance to the Christian right, the first
stages of his run for President in 2000, and more.
Quote: “No projection has been as abused in the pursuit of size distortion
as that devised by sixteenth-century atlas publisher and cartographer
Gerardus Mercator. Designed specifically to aid navigators,
the Mercator projection vastly enlarges poleward areas so that
straight lines can serve as loxodomes, or rhumb lines—that is, lines
of constant geographic direction.... Yet for decades the John Birch
Society and other political groups intimidated by Communist ideology
and Stalinist atrocities have reveled in the Mercator’s cartographic
enhancement of the Soviet Union. Birch Society lecturers
warning of the Red menace commonly shared the stage with a massive
Mercator map of the world with China and Russia printed in
provocative, symbolically rich red....” [pp 94-6]
Quote: “...American maps often omit information that might embarrass
industrial polluters or local officials.... The 1946 map [of Love
Canal, New York] which shows the canal as a long, straight vertical
feature, fails to indicate use of the canal since 1942 as a dump for
chemical waste. The 1980 map not only shows no trace of the filledin
canal but ignores the area’s tragic history...” [p 121]
The University of Chicago Press • 1996 • 209 pp • softcover • $15
• ISBN 0-226-53421-9 •
Quote: “Bush, who vowed to make significant strides in increasing
the number of minority appointments to state boards and commissions
as governor, actually decreased minority choices by 15 percent,
compared to his predecessor’s tenure in office....
“Allegations of racial prejudice by the governor were raised at the
end of his first term in office when a report was issued noting that of
the fourteen pardons he granted, all but one (a Hispanic convicted
of a 1961 burglary) had been given to white males.” [pp 211-2]
Quote: “In 1998, before departing on a high-profile trip to the Middle
East, Bush sophomorically joked with U.S. reporters that the first
thing he would say to his hosts in Israel would be that they were all
‘going to hell.’” [p 3 of photo insert]
Quote: “When President Clinton’s extramarital affairs made headlines
in in 1998, Bush announced—without being asked by the
media—that he’d been faithful to Laura, his wife of more than twenty
years. He had also repeatedly recited his story of a ‘young and
irresponsible’ early life of excessive drinking followed by sobriety at
age forty. Unlike drinking and infidelity, cocaine use is illegal and
You are Being Lied To
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