Recently I added, “A Hail Of Dead Cats” to my links list. Don Arthur has been a regular contributor to the Web Diary of Margot Kingston at the Sydney Morning Herald that I have enjoyed over a long period … at least I can remember reading his comments on the Web Diary over the period that I have been accessing on the web. He frequently has a lovely turn of phrase and a pithy and pointed way of looking at things that often make me think “do I agree with him, or not?”


Last Saturday’s entry (Casting Osama: B grade thinking about the war on terror) on his blog likened the various responses to the “War on Terrorism” to various B-grade movie plots, and the telling of stories to finding an understanding of what might be some of the underlaying ‘themes' implicit in reactions to the developments in world politics since last September.

Some of the Dirty Harry buffs think that if you disagree with them you're trying to cast Osama as Harry - that you're blaming the victims of 9/11. They can't imagine that we're watching any other kind of movie.
Thing and Them fans get uptight if you try to suggest that some fundamentalist Muslims are human beings. In their films you can always tell the Enemy by looking at it. Being tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism or trying to understand anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is a kind of appeasement and it can never work. What we need are flame throwers and bunker busters.
Forbidden Planet types are always looking to see what's wrong with your head and venting their suspicions about the people in charge. They're so busy worrying about prejudice, religious intolerance and McCarthyism that they'll never do anything about stopping terrorism.
The stories we carry around with us in our heads give us the illusion that we know what we're talking about. They make us believe that a few hundred words in a newspaper of couple of minutes worth of pictures on TV each day makes us well informed enough to be offering each other foreign policy advice.
That's scarier than any movie I've seen recently.

I am not too sure I agree totally with his summation of the people who subscribe to the “Forbidden Planet” mould, having subscribed to the whole “Gospel according to Star Trek” for most of my adult life. I think that the problem I have with that particular description of the proponents of the “Forbidden Planet” movie script, is that there is insignificant acknowledgment that this particular movie is not only looking at the physical damage been done by the invisible monster, but the harm done to the person who was the unconscious progenitor of the beast.

I actually find that being reminded of this particular movie does help me get a handle on subsequent events in American and Australian political manoeuvrings. It provides a mythological background for my understanding of why Mr Bush, who was never previously known for being aware of how the rest of the world operated, has reacted with defensiveness and metaphorical cries of “If you ain’t with us, you’ve got to be against us!” as did Professor Morbius when confronted at first by the information that he was the source of the beastly happenings. Is it so hard for the “leader of the free world” to accept that perhaps the way in which his country has conducted its foreign policy might be the reason why stories are told to impressionable young men and women that imply that all their problems are sourced in “the great Satan, the USA”? Is it so hard that other people in other cultures might not want to live the same way we here in these wondrously wealthy western cultures do?
(It also suggests to me why Mr Howard might want to scurry under the protective skirts of the USA again, as Australia did during the years when "Forbidden Planet" and movies like it were first shown)

I believe we need to tell ourselves stories to explain great events to ourselves … after all, four or five thousand years after it actually happened we are still affected by the story of the fall of Troy and how it subsequently fed into the development of Hellenism and the Roman Empire!

I find myself asking for alternative stories of explanation, and remembering that “the monster” has a story too, which is often ignored by our need to be seen on the side of the “good guys”. What I am finding scary is that the other story, the one that styles those that committed the murders last September and what gave them the feeling they were the ‘good guys’, is not even being considered in the articles and news broadcasts that are commonly available to us Lounge Chair Defence Analysts (a rather nice phrase, I thought).

It is scary how that there are so few stories being made available to help us understand either side of the chasm that has opened up before us. Stories about what has happened in the world are important to our understanding to what may affect us, but when we only get one set of stories then there is a risk that those stories are easily manipulated into propaganda … in which case everybody, on both sides of the apparent chasm, looses.