Screen memories and screen perceptions are innocuous pieces of reality that people focus on when traumatized as a way to deal with the overwhelming anxiety, terror, and impotent anger that trauma provokes. By focusing on a relatively neutral aspect of the traumatic situation, the person is able to preserve an illusion of normalcy and comfort.
The behavior of much of the Media, the Democratic party, and the European elites show all the hallmarks of reliance on such screens to avoid feeling traumatized.
Consider the various dangers our country, and indeed Western Civilization, is currently facing. Much of our current discourse concerns which of two sets of dangers are most significant and most immediate.
On one side of the equation reside the risks of the Bush Administration gradually moving the country to the right, with extreme versions of this worry including creeping fascist theocracy, canceled elections in 2008, and other wild scenarios. The corollaries to this set of worries are that warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens will become mainstream, Roe v Wade will be over- turned, and that foreign nationals will not be afforded the same levels of constitutional protections as American citizens. These worries are conflated with concerns about global warming caused by CO2 production from man made sources destroying the ecosystem (though no one has suggested global warming will make the planet inhospitable to life.) Various other dangers of the imperial President Bush are introduced into the mix on a seemingly ad hoc basis.
On the other side would be the dangers of Islamic fascism in all its many guises.
This would include the danger of terror from groups like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, all of whom have threatened America and Europe at one time or another, as well as the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, which would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as the various Arab Sunni dominated states race to protect themselves from the Persian Shia (who have killed more of each other in the last 50 years than any Western regime.) Corollaries to this set of concerns are worries about Iraq devolving into full scale Sunni-Shia civil war, further civil unrest in Europe, anarchy in Palestine, and the ultimate danger of future WMD attacks on America and/or our allies with Biological, Chemical, or nuclear weapons.
I had initially considered doing a side by side comparison of the risks posed by the two distinct sets of problems, but having listed the outlines of the threat sets, it became clear that the relative risks are not even close to being of the same order of magnitude. Neo-neocon and Callimachus have discussed the relative risks of "false positive" versus "false negative" results.
Callimachus points out the danger of missing a significant threat:
There are fundamentally two types of mistake you can make at it: to fail to perceive a threat, or to perceive one that does not exist.
Of the two, the former is more catastrophic -- think Pearl Harbor, or Sept. 11 -- and so if the two errors represent the Scylla and Charybdis of the system, the conscientious espionage worker will strive to sail between them, but tack slightly closer toward the error of over-assumption.
Neo-neocon expands on his point:
In fact, Callimachus is describing the age-old scientific problem of the false negative vs. the false positive. They are both bad. But in the case of self defense, the false negative is, as Callimachus points out, a good deal more dangerous, if one is looking at it from the point of view of the need to prevent a threat from becoming a reality.
The assertion that the risk of Bush ushering in a fascist theocracy is significant while the risk of Islamic fascism (Iran, al Qaeda, et al) is minimal is risible and not worth further discussion. Furthermore, no responsible Democrat or media outlet has overtly made such an assertion (though some in Europe have bandied it about.) However, what the Media and the Democrats have done is constantly focus on the collateral risks to our "cultural values", ie they set up a standard of absolute adherence to the full panoply of American constitutional protections for everyone involved in the war, on both sides, as if the greatest risk to our culture is somehow falling short of according such protections to Iraqi insurgents or al Qaeda terrorists.
This is, on its face, a displacement of anxiety from a true danger to a relatively minor, easily correctable danger.
John Noonan appeals to old Europe's honor, sensing that their self-interest has been clouded by terror:
Where has Europe’s honor gone? Or, more precisely, where has old Europe’s honor gone? Paralyzed by the new age enlightenment of multiculturalism and internationalism, the once stoic continent has become ripe with fear. It fears upsetting its Muslim minority, it fears tough decisions, it fears upsetting the world’s dictators, and –oddly enough- it fears American hegemony.
The idea that American hegemony endangers European interest is further proof, if any is needed, that such a focus represents a defensive flight from danger.
The conviction of the Democrats, the Media, and the European elites that George Bush and the US military are more of a threat to the West than Iran and al Qaeda, for example, is a screen. None beyond the fringe have tried to argue that Islamic terrorism or Iranian nuclear weapons are not a threat. Instead they look for ways to impede America's efforts to protect all of us while at the same time developing no plans of their own which could serve as a nidus for discussion of alternatives to the course we are on.
Appeasement has been defined as feeding the crocodile with the hope that he would eat you last. The current approach exemplified by the Bush antagonists would be to attack the hunter with the big, frightening gun with the hope that the crocodile isn't really hungry. It is a prescription for a very well fed crocodile.
Addendum:
See Screen Memories & Screened Perceptions for further discussion of the concept of screen defenses, including its appearance in psychotherapy.
See Dr. Sanity for an excellent discussion on the danger of misplaced fear, and for further discussion of the defense of displacement.
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