Yesterday I started a series which offers a potential explanation of how the mind binds mental energy by the use of symbolic representations of objects (an object meaning anything from a thing, to an idea, to a relationship, with multiple layers of complexity.) The goal of the series is to understand how people's "reality templates" change. I pointed to the change in our view of Ronald Reagan's place in our recent history. While there are many who will hold into the old meme, the weight of opinion has tipped to embrace the image of Reagan as a great liberator and a giant of the 20th century. Understanding how these changes take place is crucially important because it is by way of our symbolic representations that we understand the world around us.
We tend to value people who have great facility in manipulating words, writers, lawyers, politicians, for example. One particular group that is particularly powerful and particularly well compensated for their ability to manipulate language, and more powerfully, to combine the language with vivid visual imagery, is Hollywood. The fact that Hollywood is predominantly liberal, intellectually arrogant, elitist, and, of course, unthinkingly anti-war is not terribly troubling. (If anyone knows of a thoughtful critique of the war in Iraq by a Hollywood personality, by all means send it to me; I haven't seen anything that even approaches coherency from Hollywood.) However, there is something going on in contemporary Hollywood that is much more insidious and troubling; whether or not it ultimately presents a danger is less certain to me.
Our earliest templates are formed in our early years. Once we move outside of the family relationships, our templates tend to be more schematic; the farther removed from our current experience, the more sketchy our templates become. This is one of the reasons people who have never met a Jew can be anti-Semites, or why people who grow up in lily white communities can be racist. They have no personal experience of the "stranger" and form their templates by using the information presented to them by others. They tend to identify with their parent's attitudes, but are also influenced by the visual images they see in the media. For those who do not have a strong emotional investment in the particular template, a minimalist template can be changed with relative ease by confrontation with reality. This occurs both with the non committed anti-Semite who meets some Jewish people personally and discovers they are not all __________ (fill in the blanks) but exhibit the full range of human behavior, just like anyone else. It can also happen with the conservative who used to be a liberal but was "mugged by reality."
Until 9/11, most American's template for Islam and the Arab was fairly schematic.
Our views of Arabs were formed in large part by movies and the news. Casablanca offered the Arab as an exotic back ground part of the environment; Indiana Jones showed the Arab who was a true friend, as well as those who were fanatic, allied with the Nazis and ruthless killers. These images tended to be one dimensional; few Americans knew any Arabs well.
After 9/11, the image of the Islamic fundamentalist came to dominate our discourse, so much so, that most of us were on the alert to avoid developing bigoted attitudes toward our neighbors who happened to be Islamic or from an Arab country. It is a credit to us as a tolerant people that there were very few true incidents of bigotry after 9/11. However, since 9/11 the images have faded. Bill Roggio, in colVmn revisited, reviews a Washington Times article today:
Criminal Division prosecutors and investigators, working with state and local authorities, have disrupted more than 150 terrorist cells and threats from Portland, Ore., to Lackawanna, N.Y., incapacitating more than 3,000 known operatives. They also have charged 375 persons in terrorism-related cases, 195 of whom already have pleaded guilty or been convicted, and removed from the country more than 500 people linked to September 11.
The targeted terrorists have included members of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas as part of an effort to prevent and prosecute those who commit or intend to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
Contrast this with Hollywood's latest; we are now presented with Kingdom of Heaven. Every review of this Ridley Scott epic, whether good or bad, makes the point that in Scott's PC world, any reflection of historical fact is accidental, all the Arabs are noble and tolerant, and the only truly despicable characters are the Christian fundamentalists. Of course, Scott fails to note that in the twelfth century there was no such thing as a liberal secular Christian or Arab, but why let reality intrude into the PC world, where the only acceptable evil is from Westerners.
The danger that arises from the media and Hollywood relentlessly hiding images of Islamofascist atrocities, while glossing over the historical reality of Islam's rise at the point of a sword and their current manifestos vowing to do the same to us in the present that was done to infidels in the past, combined with incessant attempts to portray the West as the source of all evil in the world, is that we become mentally disarmed. A portion of our society already has a template of Christians as evil, intolerant, potentially terrorist; contrast that with the nobility of the Minutemen of Michael Moore or the Twelfth century Arabs of Ridley Scott and it appears we have yet another area where we are failing in the information war.
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