The eye-flick

Some years ago – it’s been over a decade – I had gotten to know a young film student at MSU in Bozeman, Montana. I don’t know how this came about other than her being a barista at the coffee shop we frequented. We attended the showing of her film along with many others at graduation that year – she was part of a group, and I have no memory of their film. Later, and again I do not know how it came about, I passed along to her a copy of the original slave narrative from the University of North Carolina that was the basis for the Hollywood treatment of the incident called Amistad. (It got a royal Spielberging, which is why I am reluctant to sit through his rendition of Lincoln.)

This incident comes to mind because of another memory: while waiting for her to serve my coffee one morning, she told me about a film being made about the Ottoman treatment of Armenians, which she called the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” I responded that, as I recalled from my own reading, the first genocide of that century was in the Philippines, and was carried out by the United States. Her eyes flickered – and it is that flicker I remember so well. She was not stupid or shallow – far from it. The movement of the eyes was a reflex reference to her intellectual framework – she had quickly scanned her knowledge base and come up empty. My reference to a “genocide” carried out by the United States was outside her realm of the possible. No doubt within 30 seconds the conversation left her mind, never to return.

This young woman was a senior about to graduate from an American land-grant college. She studied the arts, and not history, but I would be quite surprised if any history major from that institution would offer a different response.

This reminds me of a conversation I and with my then-sentient mother in the 1990’s. She was all Catholic all the time and anti-abortion, and I had sinned grievously by running for office as a pro-choice candidate. This, in an Irish-Catholic family with a rock-star priest as a brother, was a source of background angst for both my parents. Though I have not walked in those shoes, I wonder what it is like to announce to your parents that you are gay. I ran for state legislature in a different district, so they were not allowed to vote against me.

The conversation I had with her concerned the then-ongoing American genocide in Iraq. The Clintonites at that time were carrying out the (HW) Bushite policy of withholding food, medicine and supplies from that country, and kids and old people were dying in bring-out-your-dead truckloads. Mom was a product of Fox News, but it would have been no different if she were an NPR listener. The propaganda system had fixed her brain in such a way that the word “Iraq” automatically triggered an image of Saddam Hussein, evil, mustachioed, brutal, probably having horns and red eyes. He was the face of the enemy, the Jungian archetype implanted in the public brain by the propagandists.

To get around that image, I conceded to her that he was indeed a tyrant, but one that the U.S. had supported through his very worst crimes. I knew he was a bad dude, I said. I even recalled where he had taken a member of a meeting he supervised out of the room and shot him. So I had read.

What did Mom remember of that conversation in the ensuing years? Nothing, except that Saddam had shot a guy outside a meeting. I don’t recall the eye-flicker of non-comprehension, but probably just missed it.

Which brings to mind an incident from two nights ago. My office sits in a pathway between the family room and kitchen, and generally there are books and papers strewn about. Usually the lights are out and people go the other direction, but that night one family member walked through the office and saw a book sitting out, Dr. Judy Wood’s “Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free Energy Technology on 9/11.” Later she asked me what I thought about 9/11 – wasn’t there something fishy going on that day? I didn’t want to have such a conversation with a family member, and so deflected and changed the subject.

This is a smart family, but a wholly American one, and generally apolitical. The fact that one expressed incredulity about that day caught me off guard. American propaganda has implanted a trigger image – whenever we hear “9/11” we are conditioned to immediately imagine Osama bin Laden, evil, mustachioed, brutal, probably having horns and red eyes. That’s called “putting a face on the enemy,” a standard practice since the early days of opinion management via mass media. In the U.S. it might even go back to the time of Huns and Kaisers, and probably before that in our print media. But images in visual media are far more effective, as the brain does not filter them through an nternal censor as it does words. (This is why television news is so effective in controlling opinion – no matter the flood of words that come from that source every day, it is images that are telling the stories.)

This person is not political, so her curiosity was a surprise until I remembered … she is Canadian, and lived in Canada at that time. She was not subject to American news reporting that day, and so did not collect our impressions. Canadian news is more detached and objective, about American affairs anyway, so that her mind was not fixated on images of planes hitting buildings and of Osama. (In fact, there was a great upsurge at that time of American viewership of Canadian Broadcasting via the Internet, people looking for a better outlook on events of the day. I went there myself quite frequently.)

I see that eye-flick of the young movie-maker on occasion I know what it means. It can be summed up as “no frame of reference.” It is the answer to the question “Why are Americans so ignorant?” We are no more or less smart or stupid than any other society on the planet. We are also inundated with words and images, and have opportunity to seek out information from everywhere, from every frame of reference. But we don’t. Just as the big media companies owned our opinions before the Internet, they still do. Thought control in the Internet age is every bit as pervasive as before. It’s an amazing accomplishment.

This is not a put-down of our culture, our sports and Jersey Shores and Black Fridays and “USA! USA!” It is about our frame of reference. We are taught to look at the world and our country from a knowledge base that includes only certain facts. These include those matters of great pride, like our founding documents, regarded as sacred. These include our exceptionalism, and our intent always to do the right thing, to be the good guy an an evil world. An uniformed uninformed American youth is an object of adoration, while one in a German uniform is a murderer. Our teachers, brought up in this framework, also teach it, and the very idea that they should not do so yields the eye-flick.

I guess I will await another opportunity some day in the future to discuss American history with our Canadian family member. She is as innocent as she is kind, and did not seek out a special connection or anything like that. We simply for one minute stood on common ground in our view of events from outside the American propaganda system.
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PS: I see where Hollywood, fresh off Argo success, is again doing its part in reinforcing our bullshit history. They will be celebrating the re-killing of the long-dead Osama in theaters at Christmas. The film is called “Nation’s Pride Zero Dark Thirty.” I’m sure the imagery will be stunning, though the red eyes, fangs and horns will be subtly inferred via indirect means. It’s hard to watch – not the movie, but Americans. Such drivel flows too easily across our landscape.