Video killed the rational star
Published by punkass marc September 12th, 2006 in Video, WingnutsI should probably be numb to the endless stream of bile spewing forth from the right, but the LGF comments I wrote about this morning really bothered me. The calls for genocide were so sincerely angry, it was as though the people writing them had suffered deep, recent personal loss at the hands of every single Muslim.
Unfortunately, a lot of people felt that way on 9/11. The live images of the Towers being hit, burning, and eventually falling drove plenty of folks bonkers for some period of time. It didn’t jive with the world as most of us understood it at the time.
Wounds are supposed to heal. The intense irrational fear that overcomes us at a moment of great shock naturally fades. For whatever reason, we’re built to get over, or at least get past, even our most tragic events over time. Memory kinda works that way.
But what if we were repeatedly forced to see exactly what we saw on the day — at the moment — we were shocked and scared? Wouldn’t that make it harder to get over it? Or worse, what if we came to _like_ the nonsensical way we felt after such an event, or at least got used to it? What if we wanted to hold onto those feelings? Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could relive the moment by seeing exactly what we saw then?
Most wingnuts who say things like “level Mecca” and “it’s time for another f*cking Crusade” didn’t live in New York on Sept. 11th, 2001. They saw the tragedy unfold on CNN or Fox News. The anger that fuels their hatred today boiled up when they helplessly watched those first broadcasts.
And thanks to the power of the internet, they can watch the same broadcasts again and again. Their ringleaders can trot them out every anniversary or whenever they feel the collective hatred slipping ever so slightly. Republicans can squawk all they want about Always Remembering and Never Forgetting, but without the ability to replay the exact video footage the wingnuts watched that day, they could never make it stick.
By reconnecting themselves and their followers with exactly what they saw on 9/11, they can replenish the irrational, fear-driven bloodlust they felt as everything actually transpired. Much to my surprise, it seems the wingnuts were the first group to discover and mass market a truly renewable energy source: a digital fuel that provides us unlimited genocidal rage.
No one I’ve heard of who was actually there on that day expressed any of this irrational bloodlust. Most people were and are still too shocked, scared, and humbled by what they experienced to have any desire to trivialize their feelings with jingoistic handwringing. I think it was mostly people at a distance who felt any real desire for blood, of which I was one.
The LGF’ers are just a bunch of useless fucks who are trying to avoid becoming adults.
The fantasy worlds they create and attempt to occupy are their last bastion against the mundane truth of existence, and they’re fighting tooth and nail to avoid the inevitable absorption/assimilation into adult life…
I’m fairly sure that these fuckers already had the rage & hatred to hand, this just gave them the perfect outlet/excuse.
I think the repeated video watching is a ritual. And like all rituals, it only has meaning to the believers. Those of us outside the believer community can watch the ritual and participate in the ritual, but it doesn’t mean anything to us. Rituals gain meaning by having something deep and compelling about them, which is why the ‘nuts always tell themselves this is about Bearing Witness or Honoring the Dead. But, as you noted, it’s obviously just the Two Minute Hate.
firefalluk,
maybe you’re right. i said the same yesterday morn. but we’ve also never had this kind of event watched live by so many people, nor have people had unlimited access to the exact same visual input they had right as they were overwhelmed by a national tragedy.
if 9/11 footage never existed, i honestly think that a number of the war-minded howlers wouldn’t have been able to keep up their adrenaline on the subject. but it does exist, it’s never going away, and they can tap back into the irrational anger of that day at will.
this is definitely a new problem.
Would the Low-tooth-per-capita Footballers have the same reaction to the grisly images Afghani or Iraqi civillians killed over the last 5 years?
No one I’ve heard of who was actually there on that day expressed any of this irrational bloodlust. Most people were and are still too shocked, scared, and humbled by what they experienced to have any desire to trivialize their feelings with jingoistic handwringing.
There was a feature in the Village Voice not long after the attacks about people’s reactions and anger. One guy had a lot of anger toward Arabs and Muslims, but he knew it was wrong to generalize or express it.
So he bought a bunch of Middle Eastern food and took out his rage on it. “BAD babaganoush! EVIL, MURDEROUS hummous! TERRORIST falafel!”
I always thought hummus was giving me the crook eye…