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June 05, 2006
Round up the usual semiotics
Following excellent reportage over the weekend, the Toronto Star took all of 48 hours to get on message about the recent arrest of a purported terror cell in southern Ontario.* The real story: Police theatrics surrounding the court appearance of the accused.
Unconsciously, receptive audiences for police actions are created by such TV shows as the Fox hit 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer. Viewers sympathize with Bauer, no matter what he has to do, because they want him to get the bad guys and protect the free world.
Edmunds argued that certain memes — or unspoken beliefs in any culture — are constantly being reinforced. Here, he said, the message was that police know what they are doing and they are protecting us.
"It's all global theatre, as Marshall McLuhan used to say. We assume the police want to help us and we assume it's good."
Neat academic turn of phrase here: "we assume the police want to help us and we assume it's good." By "we" he of course means "you" unless you, dear reader, agree the party line that the police are always already about political theatre and not, say, policing. Such is the happy illusion of program administrators whose homes and families are protected by said police. But for academics whose broader illusions about "terror" took a poke in the eye over the weekend it is time to round up the usual semiotics. If anti-Americanism and virtuous insignificance could not shield us perhaps chanting one of the other incantations will do the trick.
What I cannot figure out is whether it is the Star or the McLuhan Program who have so miscontrued "memes". Susan Blackmore has an excellent book on the subject for anyone bothered to use the term properly.
*This target map published by Andrew Coyne shows the CSIS facility mentioned in some news reports and other scenic targets downtown. The Toronto Star building is off-camera and it may seem sensible to keep it that way. Plenty other food for the crocodile. Note the CBC is listed as an unlikely target. Such is the delusion of the right and the left that domestic politics have anything to do with the motivations of the jihadis (whether or not the justice system determines this particular group of accused to be such).
Sometimes the sky really is falling Update: Nothing new, but it bears repeating.
"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs."
- Kenneth Clark
Dark Ages Update: June 6 - It turns out Andrew Coyne's map-maker really did speak too soon. Alongside reported plans to behead Canada's Prime Minister the jihadis are said to have planned to storm and bomb the CBC headquarters building. So much for the smugness of the Canadian right for assuming the jihadis would appreciate the CBC's purportedly sympathetic coverage. And so much for the Canadian left for assuming anti-American rhetoric has any meaning in this new dark age.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 5, 2006 07:39 AM
