Kanjorski: Meme and Counter-meme

On September 18, 2008 the Treasury and/or the Fed stepped in to halt withdrawals or US money market mtual funds after a brief period in the late morning in which those withdrawals reached 'apocalyptic' levels, $500 billion or maybe $550 billion.

That is the meme under examination. As I noted yesterday, there's no reason to believe it, but all of a sudden over the last two weeks it was everywhere in the blogosphere and beyond.

On Tuesday, Feb. 10, Rush Limbaugh picked up on it. He played a bit of the YouTube clip of Kanjorsky's CSpan diatribe. Then he, Limbaugh, interrupted the clip, told he listeners there was more, and played some more of the clip.

What was the point of the interruption? Dramatic effect? Or was he working from the presumption that two 'witnesses' are better than one? Even if the two-ness is created by artificial splicing? Kanjorski a few seconds later 'confirming' what Kanjorski had said a few seconds earlier.

Anyway, I think with Limbaugh's involvement we get to the heart of why the Kanjorsky meme became so popular so quickly. It gave everyone what they wanted. If you believe that those nasty capitalists are always on the edge of destroying the world unless the wise central planners in Washington step in: this is the meme for you. That appears to be the basis of its attraction to PK himself.

Conservatives like Limbaugh, on the other hand, like it because it lends itself to conspiratorial spin -- some dark source behind the scenes created this alleged $5oo billion run on the money markets -- and that gives them the comforting sense that George W. Bush was really one of them at heart after all, and turned against them in the final months only because he was bamboozled by this manufactured emergency.

So it gives everyone what they want. How nice. How apt. How still untrue.

Credit goes to Felix Salmon for setting up an effective counter-meme. Look for a source! Since he has been addressing the subject on his blog (part of the website of Conde Nast's Portfolio), some of those who originally took the diatribe at face value have changed their tune.

Take Ben Smith, a blogger on Politico. On Tuesday, Smith simply posted the CSpan video, a transcript, and a believer's headline, "The near miss." [What we had "nearly missed," if you haven't heard, is "the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it," Kanjorski's words, bold-faced in Smith's posting.]

But then Salmon started urging people to look for Kanjorski's sources -- to look, that is, to the question of whether he has any or whether he has talked himself into his account of the late morning of September 18th. Salmon's countermeme has had its effect on Smith, who posted this very different entry two days later.

On February 11th, Alice Cherbonnier of the Baltimore Chronicle had this to contribute, "I apologize to those on our news list to whom I sent the Kanjorski C-Span link."

A lot of hairy stuff did happen in the middle of September 2008, which included the withdrawal of a good deal of money from mutual funds. But the scale of the "near-miss" Kanjorski has talked himself into would be something else again and, no matter how neat a story it makes, it is only that: a story.

As Cherbonnier aptly says, "Kanjorski in this case is just another sorry political bit player who's trying to deflect blame from himself and his cohorts on the impotent congressional financial oversight committees."

The story of Kanjorski and Salmon, of the meme and counter-meme, may make a fascinating case study for some future student of the "sociology of knowledge."