Oh say you can't see

I was recently using the analogy of society as a body and I asserted that news organizations are the body's eyes. Information is channelled to the brain through the eyes, and information is channelled from the media out to society at large.

Right wing bloviators are often fond of saying that the media has a liberal bias. They like to call it "The Mainstream Media". I've heard many statements about how the media has a agenda and they are trying to steer the country in the wrong direction. These are usually people that watch Fox News and O'Reilly and listen to Rush Limbaugh, so I shouldn't take it too seriously. I hear them saying that the media concentrates only on the negative things in Iraq and aren't showing all the good that's being done there. These are the same people that start saying "Remember 9/11, those terrorists are going to attack again any time now" when an election is in the works and their Republican champions need to be reelected.

I get tired of the simple and effective way that fearmongers and sensationalists can drag whole segments of society over to their way of thinking. In a recent This WNYC Radiolab broadcast, they reviewed the old War of the Worlds radio show. Many people were fooled by a newscast style dramatization of an Alien Invasion in 1938. What many people don't know is that it happened again in Quito Ecuador and Buffalo New York. The point they were trying to make was that people are susceptible to deception. They pointed out that the formula of the broadcast was the voice of a newscaster calmly describing some terror or catastrophe, similar to Edward R. Murrow's description of the Blitz in London during WWII. People like to hear from news authorities that things are dire, but they can explain it calmly. They also mentioned FDR's fireside chats as similar formula: things are bad, but we understand what's going on and we're under control.

Hype and hysteria are irresistible to the average person. The Radiolab broadcast showed how news organizations like to lead with some kind of horrible hype and hook you in so you'll watch the whole broadcast. "What are you feeding your children that can KILL them? Coming up soon after a word from our sponsor."

It wouldn't be so disturbing if people weren't so gullible. I get several emails a week that are forwards of some crisis or another that always proves to be a complete fabrication. My boss dropped an email on my desk with a caption "Interesting" scribbled on it about how much more taxes we were paying under Clinton. I Googled it and found it's source to the be blog "Thoughts of a Conservative Christian". In the piece, the author sites a taxpayer.org or some such organization that gave him the numbers. Two seconds later, I'm on that site and interestingly, its cover page is dedicated to debunking the piece that led me to them. Does nobody check any facts any more? People especially like to hear about things that reinforce what they already believe, and they react with horror and anger at anything they don't already believe. Look at Creationists reaction to Evolution or many people's reaction to Climate Change science.

And they usually say it about the news organizations that are out there actually gathering information, checking facts, and presenting valid news. "Why do you have to focus on all the bad things?" they might ask. Because there are bad things happening, and the first step to prevent or fix the bad things that happen is to look the problem over without flinching. To say that news is biased and must be controlled, censored or repudiated is a real dangerous step. This is like saying you want to cut out your own eyes or put on blinders and try to navigate in the world. The solution isn't to shoot the messenger, but to track down the real problems and try to solve them.

Fear and Control

When Heath Ledger died last week, it was unexpected. I remembered him mostly from A Knight's Tale, where he was pretty funny. Everyone remembers that Heath was in Brokeback Mountain. No one I know watched that movie. I didn't even know what it was about. The movie got awards and recognition, so that usually tells you that it's good, but I wasn't about to walk up to the counter at Blockbuster video rental and plop down a "gay flick".

I heard the scenery in the movie was beautiful, but I thought it was a gay romance film. When Heath Ledger died, I decided to rent the movie. My wife and I watched it last night.

Spoiler alert. You may want to skip the next 3 paragraphs if you haven't seen it. It was a good movie. It was sad. I kept thinking that it didn't seem realistic that they were really in love, it seemed just like actors playing a role. That's true for most Hollywood movie romances, as far as I'm concerned. We kept waiting, wondering where the movie was going. I did not know it was set in 1963 up to the late 70s/early 80s. The movie was about suppressed romance. The two characters were gay, but couldn't come out of the closet, or truly express their love for each other or live together.

Then, Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist dies. When Heath's character Ennis Del Mar contacts Jack's widow and parents you see the true cost of their actions. They denied themselves their whole lives until it was too late.

It wasn't clear to me what happened to Jack. Earlier, Ennis had told a story about some gay ranchers being tortured to death, possibly by his father, that set the tone for the whole movie. Ennis was scared to go public because he had seen clearly what can happen to gay people in his world. I missed a brief part where they showed Jack being beaten by some guys in a field. Before my wife told me that, it was not clear if Jack actually died by accident or was killed for being gay. It seems clear that Jack's parents knew their son was gay and his mother at least was sympathetic about her son's plight and Ennis's grief. I guess that's part of what made it so sad. This guy loses his lover and can't even properly mourn for him. Jack's parents even told Ennis that Jack wanted to live with him on a ranch out there, so they knew that Ennis was Jack's true love. The father wasn't very pleased about it, but he also was not overly hostile toward Ennis.

It's odd that in the movie, Heath lives, and in real life, he died. Some of the tone of the movie, the tragic death of someone before their time, parallels real life. Who knows what Heath Ledger would have been like if he had lived.

Talking about the movie afterwards, I remarked that fear of homosexuality wasn't always around. The Greeks were fairly open about male homosexuality, and there was no stigma about it. My wife pointed out that Christianity imposed the restrictions. It's all about fear and control. You're supposed to be afraid of the consequences, and that's how the church maintains their control over you.

On one hand, things seem to be changing. There seems to be more understanding and a greater tolerance by society at large about homosexuality. However, the church is fighting back, as they see their control slipping. The ability for men to be openly gay gains ground a little bit each year.

I was also thinking about female heterosexual sexuality. Islamic fundamentalism has sought to suppress this aspect of life, with little true success. We in the west don't have much problem seeing this as restrictive, against human nature, and inherently wrong, but we turn around and apply the same restrictions to gays.

I guess we still have some growing up to do.

Fear Not

On this sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, I am thinking about how our country has transformed and the direction we are headed.

FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".

George Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... don't get fooled again."

While many have made fun of W's mashup of an old adage and a song by the Who, it is very telling. For a man that has done more to benefit from and exploit the fears of Americans than anyone could dream, this cyclic ramping up of the fear factor has been a constant theme.

But Americans are increasingly saying to W, "you can't fool us with that again".

The terrorists are a small, highly motivated, and completely insane faction. Wrapping a hatred that makes them desire to kill us in a religious mantle and trying to spread it around the world was something of a hard sell in the days before 9/11. Sure, American policy in the Israeli Palestine conflict was bound to keep a certain portion of the Arab population enraged, but as long as most people could make a decent living and not be assaulted with too many atrocities or outrageous actions (in their minds) by the Americans, they could easily dismiss the terrorist factions.

Not any more. The propaganda of the jihadist that America was something to fear, revile, and resist has been cranked up to a fever pitch by our occupation of Iraq. The recruiting floodgates are open now, despite our intentions.

I resent the fact that every time the administration's influence was slipping, suddenly a new terrorist threat would be trotted out and hyped up. The administration has used these fears to prosecute an unjustified war with little interference by oversight bodies, and has consolidated power including the right to spy on Americans under cover of these fears. For an Administration that is incapable of making any decisions without primarily considering the political impact of them, is it any wonder that the public fears these people being given more power? Given their political track record, does anybody feel that they are incapable of using increased surveillance with no oversight to peep into the private lives of political adversaries?

The terrorists are small in number and usually disunified in action. Their acts seem horrific, but in reality are not that significant. That's right, that is exactly what I said so let me explain. The 9/11 attack was not that significant in itself. Only around 3,000 people died, and we lost the World Trade Center, 4 planes, and damaged the Pentagon. While that is the most successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, that is not a huge attack. If you lost someone personally in the attacks, it was very important and significant, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm talking about the impact to the nation as a whole. What was a big impact was the national perception of what happened and the psychological reaction to it. If we had just had a leader that stood up and repeated FDR's assurances to us, explained that the attack was so much more lucky for the terrorists than they had any right to expect, and so easy to thwart in retrospect, people would have understood that they had little to fear personally.

Our society is not too bright about risk assessment and our media is doing nothing to correct these overblown fears and misconceptions. How many people do you know that were afraid that a person was going to wait under their car and cut their achilles tendon in a mall parking lot based on a stupid urban legend? How many people are so fearful that their children are going to be abducted that they don't allow them to play and have a normal childhood anymore? The average American is horrible at assessing risk and seeks to spend an inordinate amount of time defending against or just worrying about events that are so remotely probable as to be virtually impossible.

So looking back on what the terrorists did to us that day, I would say the worst thing that they did was teach us that we have nothing better to do but live in fear. That is the real tragedy of 9/11.