The Secret Downing Street Memo,the One Percent Doctrine,and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text

Presented to the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Montreal, Canada, on August 7, 2006, this performance text is a critique of the Bush administration and its reliance on science, or evidence‐based models of inquiry (SBR). SBR raises issues concerning the politics of truth and evidence. These issues intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts to fit ideology. Three versions of SBR are discussed. A model of science as disruptive cultural practice is outlined. I locate the interactionist project in the discourses surrounding the global war on terror and the war in Iraq. I conclude by calling for a merger of critical pedagogy with a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism.