FOREWORD

JIM HIGHTOWER

If Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the boys—the founding fathers—could see what today’s leaders have done with their historic handiwork, they’d be scratching their white powered wigs in befuddlement.

How, they’d ask, did America go from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to torture, repression of dissent, and pursuit of empire? How did “promote the general welfare” get twisted into tax giveaways for the superrich while millions of children are left with no health coverage? How did “We the people” become they the corporations?

Past leaders who tapped into America’s enormous potential for economic fairness, social justice, and opportunity for all have been supplanted by a new breed of cynical manipulators who trade in fear: color-coded fear of foreign madmen; fear of losing your job, home, and health insurance; fear of fear; fear of a Black preacher, for Godssake!

What happened? The fearmongers—striving to impose both a right-wing and a corporate agenda—learned the importance in our culture of telling a story. Underlying their story is a scary worldview teaching that people—that is, “others,” “strangers,” “them”—are evil at heart and should be treated with suspicion. Forget “Love thy neighbor” Keep your eyes on that SOB! Also central to their story is the pernicious notion that, far from all of us being in this together, each of us is on our own, and everybody must grab as much as they can, as fast as they can.

So these plutocrats, autocrats, theocrats, and kleptocrats spun Horatio Alger tales that glorified barons of commerce and the rise of dot-com billionaires; their newspapers and television stations extolled the privatization of all things public; laissez-faire ideologues were lionized, while unionists and environmentalists were trivialized; they wallowed piously in stories of “family values,” even as they proselytized against getting involved in “socialistic” concerns for the larger human family; and they painted images of foreign enemies wielding weapons of mass destruction, as well as bamboozling us with fantasies for neer-do-wells here at home who are out to take our property and livelihoods.

The Powers That Be and their Republican enablers are still churning out meticulously-constructed, focus-group-tested messages that perpetuate fear and aim to make us think that what they want is what we want.

So, where are the Democrats? Where is the liberating, uniting, energizing, progressive story of America, the storyline on which our great country was founded, the ongoing democratic message that leads us toward a just and hope-filled future?

Too often, our story is buried in talking points, a deluge of facts, and a plethora of platform planks. A great grassroots visionary and friend of mine, Van Jones, heads the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California. Encouraging liberals to reach out to people with more than statistics and power-point presentations, Van notes that Martin Luther King Jr. did not say: “I have a … position paper.”

No, Rev. King had a dream, and he painted it beautifully, memorably for us in words.

Enter Thom Hartmann—a radio talkshow host, journalist, psychotherapist, and communications expert who has thought a lot and learned a lot about talking to regular folks—that is, the hoi polloi, the rank and file … you and me.

On his daily Air America radio broadcast, Thom makes a point of inviting “The Enemy” onto his show, both as guests and as callers. He has learned their spin, cracked their code, and he has brought us this book to explain how we can do the same.

Keep in mind, this book is not about pointing fingers. After all, as Thorn says, “we’re all just human here” and everyone votes with the intention of building a society in which their children can grow up safe, healthy, and happy. The problem is that the people at the top—the puppeteers of Corporate America and the Republican party—manipulate the truth to advance their repressive, avaricious, anti-democratic agendas.

Through radio transcripts and historical examples that span back to the 1600s, Thom exposes the inner mechanisms of conservative storytelling and explains exactly how Republicans try to use fear to trump home. Thom dissects a handful of recent campaigns, including the Republican Party’s casting of John Kerry a “flip-flop-per” in the 2004 presidential election, and—more devastatingly—Bush’s manipulation of 9/11 to justify an invasion of Iraq (which, Thom points out, is no longer a war but an occupation).

If We the People are to reclaim the power that corporations and right-wing governments have long usurped, it’s time to take action. Our politicians can’t save us, no matter how persuasive an orator or how experienced a decision-maker sits in the Oval Office. The burden lies on every individual to absorb the lessons of Thom’s book and spread the liberal story far and wide.

Cracking the Code is more than a book about politics, more than a book about communication. It’s a book about all the ways you and I can connect with each other to build a better society based on the values of our nation’s founders. We have the ability and responsibility to take Thom’s belief to heart—that how we communicate dictates how we live, which in turn shapes our world—and act. Reading this book is the first crucial step in that direction.