The Real Disney World
I’ve always been interested in the general U.S. perception of “them.”
By “them” I mean: “they,” “the other,” “the enemy,” “the ones who hate us,” “the terrorists,” “those who ‘aren’t with us,’” and, in the case of some who like to have a specific enemy, “the Muslims,” “the Arabs.”
Truth be told, even since September 11, 2001, despite the ferocity and hideousness of those attacks, I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the rhetoric against anyone who dislikes the U.S. or disagrees with U.S. foreign policy, especially as I’ve heard that rhetoric grow increasingly vituperative and violent. At this point, after having spent a total of two out of the last five years in the Middle East (amongst “them”) I personally grow increasingly angry about that rhetoric for a number of reasons. I just hope that that anger doesn’t turn to bitterness and despair, because if anger alone is a wasted emotion then bitterness and despair are worse.
One of my original goals was to limit display of ideological bias, but I realize that the last few posts have broken that initial intent. I think that was a goal as a result of influence from my best teachers, both at Oak Ridge High School and at West Point; they never let on their ideological biases. And trust me, being someone who tries incessantly to deconstruct everything I learn, I tried my utmost to identify any shred of bias in what I was being taught.
To begin the real discussion, I’m going to throw all of us Disney lovers back to one of the best Disney films of all time: The Lion King. This movie was awesome. It had the plains of Africa, complete with background singing in Swahili. It had zebras, hyenas, mere cats, wild boars, apparently what is a ‘mandrill-baboon hybrid,’ and of course: lions. It had action and drama, love and treachery.
I remember during the 2004 Presidential campaign an advertisement for the incumbent president’s reelection. It featured dark woods… moving through the dark woods… low speaking voice… quick moving dark shapes…And then… a Bear!
Oh wait, sorry, no that was a Reagan commercial 20 years earlier.
And then…
I’m going to jump to my point. I’ve heard critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East, during the War on Terror especially, be accused of “living in Disney World” (amongst other, much less palatable insults). Yet I would argue very vehemently that, in truth, it is actually very much the other way around.
That makes it pretty clear: they are illogically against us. They hate freedom. That means they are evil, and thus illogical. That means that we are the good guys.
The “terrorists” are not evil hyenas, nor the wolves of the election commercial. They are human beings, just as we are, who perceive a tangible threat emanating from the United States. You might say, for security studies people, that they perceive a threat to their security: the security of their way of life, their homes, and even their quality of life. Whether or not that threat is real is irrelevant to the fact that, if nothing is done to change the perception, then those human beings that feel threatened will take up arms to fight the perceived threat.
I am saying that we continue to fail at understanding the causes for the attack. The general conceptualization, that there is no logical cause to be understood, is a fallacy.
I’ve always been interested in the general U.S. perception of “them.”
By “them” I mean: “they,” “the other,” “the enemy,” “the ones who hate us,” “the terrorists,” “those who ‘aren’t with us,’” and, in the case of some who like to have a specific enemy, “the Muslims,” “the Arabs.”
Truth be told, even since September 11, 2001, despite the ferocity and hideousness of those attacks, I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the rhetoric against anyone who dislikes the U.S. or disagrees with U.S. foreign policy, especially as I’ve heard that rhetoric grow increasingly vituperative and violent. At this point, after having spent a total of two out of the last five years in the Middle East (amongst “them”) I personally grow increasingly angry about that rhetoric for a number of reasons. I just hope that that anger doesn’t turn to bitterness and despair, because if anger alone is a wasted emotion then bitterness and despair are worse.
One of my original goals was to limit display of ideological bias, but I realize that the last few posts have broken that initial intent. I think that was a goal as a result of influence from my best teachers, both at Oak Ridge High School and at West Point; they never let on their ideological biases. And trust me, being someone who tries incessantly to deconstruct everything I learn, I tried my utmost to identify any shred of bias in what I was being taught.
I justify this new turn of mine for two reasons. The first is obvious; I’m not a teacher imparting knowledge, I’m someone who is trying to have an immediate impact on the world, in whatever small way I can, in the direction of what I feel is right. The second is more personal in that my time as a Rotary scholar is coming to a close, more or less, though I must remain in the area to finish my degree for a few more months; that prospect is adding urgency to my message.
To begin the real discussion, I’m going to throw all of us Disney lovers back to one of the best Disney films of all time: The Lion King. This movie was awesome. It had the plains of Africa, complete with background singing in Swahili. It had zebras, hyenas, mere cats, wild boars, apparently what is a ‘mandrill-baboon hybrid,’ and of course: lions. It had action and drama, love and treachery.
As any Disney lover will certainly remember, The Lion King was a Hamlet story except much better than Hamlet for two reasons. The first and most important: it was with lions, obviously. Second, because in the end, as opposed to Hamlet, the good guys win and the bad guys lose.
The good guys win and the bad guys lose. In our story, these bad guys are the voracious and unconscionable hyenas led by the treacherous and ambitious Scar. Evil just exudes from this lethal combination of characters. When Scar and the hyenas make their evil plot to conquer Pride Rock, we know that they are the bad guys. Why? It doesn’t matter! For us, it’s simply enough that “they are evil.” It doesn’t matter why they are evil; evil is purely evil. It is illogical and the result of something rotten inherently intrinsic in “them,” whoever “they” are.
I begin to wonder though. Why would the hyenas harbor dislike and hatred for Mufasa? As the hyenas state in the film at one point, Mufasa essentially drove the hyenas into the elephant graveyard to live off of scraps and bones. I wonder what other perceived injustices the hyenas suffered at the hands of the lions? I’m not asking about what REAL injustices they suffered, I’m asking about perceived injustices. Because whether or not those injustices are real, the perception is what the hyenas will act on. Right?
I remember during the 2004 Presidential campaign an advertisement for the incumbent president’s reelection. It featured dark woods… moving through the dark woods… low speaking voice… quick moving dark shapes…And then… a Bear!
Oh wait, sorry, no that was a Reagan commercial 20 years earlier.
And then…
A pack of wolves!
(Kind of like… a pack of Hyenas!)
The obvious message of the commercial was that America was under some unsaid threat from something similar to a pack of wolves. I think it’s safe to assume “the terrorists” were the intended message.
The world which many of our pundits rant about, which many of our “political knowledgeables” write of, and which Huntington and Lewis attempt to conceptualize and explain: that world is the real Disney World.
Theirs is a world in which “we” are the good guys and “they” are the bad guys. We are right and they are wrong. “They” are the enemy. They are incomprehensible and illogical, they are evil. And as such, there is no conceptualizing their perspective; they have no valid complaints, perceived or real, they only have hatred for us. Why do they have hatred for us? For various reasons, but most of all because we are free, of course… because we are powerful…because we are good and they are bad.
That is the world constructed by many of the voices I still hear coming from the United States, especially while I’m here in Amman, Jordan. That is the world that was constructed following the September 20, 2001 address to the joint session of Congress. That message, backed by the “scholarship” of Bernard Lewis, said unequivocally that the reason for hatred of America was simply:
They hate what they see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. [Our] leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
And in the end, the good guys always win.
I argue that reality is much more complex. We do not live in this Disney World created during the early years of the War on Terror and perpetuated to this day. The perpetuation of this fantasy world of good and evil is made painfully obvious to me every time I turn on the international news, usually the BBC, from here in Amman, Jordan.
I am by no means and in no way saying that those who committed the September 11, 2001, attacks are right. I am not saying in any way that their actions are in any way justifiable. Their actions are of the most reprehensible nature in the entire spectrum of possible human endeavors: the indiscriminate and sudden destruction of innocent human life on a mass scale.
I am saying that we continue to fail at understanding the causes for the attack. The general conceptualization, that there is no logical cause to be understood, is a fallacy.
My argument is very simple: in the course of reacting to the September 11 attacks, much of the United States , and the United States government in particular, became so caught up in this “they-evil hate us-good,” worldview that true, unbiased assessment has been discarded. In the course of creating this world of dichotomies, the United States in general has paint-brushed over any criticisms of its foreign policies and its role in the world, and furthermore refused to engage in self-critique on an institutional level. In this way, I argue that we only exacerbate our problems and ultimately seem intransigent as a whole.
The net effect of what I am saying above is that United States national security, the preeminent concern of foreign policy, is undermined: we become susceptible to “backlash.”
In order to avoid this deep and ultimately self-generated threat to our own security, the United States needs to engage in self-critique on a broader scale: on an institutional level and on a grass roots level. The enemy we face needs to be assessed based on the assumption that they are human and are essentially rational actors.
People who criticize the U.S., both within and without, need to stop being attacked and labeled as enemies of freedom or unpatriotic (yes, I have been attacked as unpatriotic for disagreeing with U.S. policies, despite the fact that I willingly volunteered to serve in the military). Only once these things get under way can we truly assess a clear path to addressing and neutralizing the threats we face, as well as deal with the (here we go- deep breath- wait for it…) the contradictions within our own, democratically determined policies.
"Hakuna Matata, it means no worries." Though...my favorite character was always Rafiki.
