RSSWag the Dog
October 12th, 2005 | View Comments
In the movie Wag the Dog, a high-ranking politico and a Hollywood producer fabricate a war to distract the public from the President’s sex scandal involving a girl scout.
The movie was weirdly prescient (or maybe some producers were working from inside info), given that the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted shortly after, complete with Clinton deciding to bomb a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in the middle of it all.
It’s a fabulous movie. Watch it if you’ve never seen it.
Perhaps I’m just an overly cynical conspiracy theorist, but well…Wag the Dog wouldn’t work as satire unless there was a grain of truth to it.
For example, in the movie they manufacture fake war hero Sergeant William “Good Ol’ Shoe” Schumann to rally people around the war effort; while we aren’t exactly parading around mildly retarded convicts as beacons of patriotism in the real world, we did find ourselves with a Jessica Lynch and a Pat Tillman.
There have been a number of studies that support the contention that Bush’s approval ratings go up every time the government raises the terror alert level. Social psychologists have gone a step further and tried to tie the phenomenon to terror management theory, which is summarized in the first link in this paragraph.
Now, we all know that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but a) they’ve been able to produce this effect experimentally, and b) the idea that high approval ratings somehow make terrorists more likely to attack is kind of silly because that would mean that either they can predict Bush’s approval ratings, or that they’re tracking the polls as closely as Karl Rove.
Given that the combination of Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination pushed Bush’s approval ratings to new lows, color me unsurprised that the New York subway threat was heavily publicized, and then apparently turned out to be bogus, with the putative informant disappearing in the aftermath.
While I think there are legitimate criticisms of the aforementioned studies and of terror management theory, when stuff like this happens, you really have to wonder.
Yvonne posted this on October 12th, 2005 @ 5:35am in News/Politics, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "Wag the Dog"
Discussion
No Comments
There are no comments yet. Be the first to leave one!
| Trackback |
And then keep track of the discussion by subscribing to this post's RSS feed.
