Invaders from Outer Space
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.com
New York City has been invaded, its buildings
blown up and its citizens slaughtered hundreds of
times. The invaders come every summer, descending
from the sky and under the earth. Sometimes they
aliens or gods or monsters. They are, however, never
Muslims.
Every summer, for 10 dollars you can see a
fantasy version of September 11 reenacted with
invading enemies who deserve no mercy and receive
none. They come in swarms, buildings fall, people
run for cover and then they are beaten back and
banished. And then, as summer fades, we pause for
that obligatory week in which attention must be paid
to commemorating the attacks of September 11 while
seeing no connection between the discharges of
tension through fictional victories used as an
escape mechanism from a war that we dare not fight.
The Dark Knight, the previous Batman film,
contained an elaborate analogy to the War on Terror,
a shadow version of the real war fought out by men
in costumes proving that it was possible to release
a big-budget movie supportive of the War on Terror
so long as it was dressed up in the right costume.
Since then, and before, New York City has been
attacked by meteors, ice ages, mythical skeletons,
more costumed criminals, the year 2012, and every
possible imaginary scenario that can be dreamed up.
It just hasn't been attacked by Muslims because
that's something that doesn't happen in movies. Only
in real life.
The actual enemy rarely shows up in movies. There
have been more movies made attacking the War on
Terror than movies showing American soldiers and law
enforcement officers fighting terrorists. After ten
years of war there have hardly been any movies made
about the war in Afghanistan and the most watched
movie about the War in Iraq began with an anti-war
quote, just so no one made any mistakes about where
everyone involved stood. And all of these are a drop
in the bucket.
Our cinematic world is a relentless barrage of
anxieties; week after week, movie theater screens
light up with depictions of civilization collapsing
into chaos, overrun by hordes of zombies and
monsters, our cities torn down, buildings burning,
police and military forces helpless in the face of
the enemy. These collective anxieties are packaged
up and exported to audiences at home and around the
world who sit watching our unacknowledged fears of
invasion and collapse play out in movie theaters.
A culture's art, no matter how tawdry it may seem,
is also its dreams. They are the stories we tell,
and they are full of conscious and unconscious
meanings. Legends are created by a culture to battle
its unspoken fears. Its great hunters and warriors,
whether born of a god, risen from the sea or wearing
a cape take a society's terrors and defeat them in a
story that is reenacted over and over again to bring
courage to the people and remind that all obstacles
may be overcome with a strong spirit.
No matter how degenerate a culture may be, its
people still need such legends because they still
have fears that need calming. The more troubled the
time, the more they have need of such legends and
the more they may even escape into them to find
comfort against the coming of the long night.
The Islamic invasion is only dealt with through such
legends where the enemy is reduced to metaphors, as
the Soviet Union and the threat of Communism were in
earlier generations. In earlier generations, we saw
the Nazi on screen, and he is still a reliable
villain, but the Communist is a more elusive fellow
and the Islamist is more likely to show up in
British movies than in American ones. Instead, the
Communist became subsumed in stories of pod people
and zombies, in depersonalized bombs falling from
the sky and enemies with accents but no ideology.
Even brainwashing was distanced as a technological
trick in the Manchurian Candidate rather than an
ideological practice.
If Communists occasionally showed up in movies,
Islamists are as rare as white elephants. There is
plenty of work for Muslim actors portraying unjustly
accused men being persecuted by bigoted and ignorant
law enforcement officers. But there is hardly any
work for them portraying terrorists. Much as
negative portrayals of Communists was Red-Baiting,
negative portrayals of Muslims is Islamophobia. And
it is better to be afraid of imaginary things than
real ones.
Progressives insist that Muslim terrorists are a
figment of our imagination, and they replace them
with figments of their imagination. Even while a
true invasion is underway, they give us imaginary
ones to transpose real threats onto fictional
threats.
Our political institutions, like our movies, prefer
to deal with fictional threats as well. The CDC has
issued an emergency preparedness plan for a zombie
attack. It's easier to prepare disaster plans for
something that won't happen than to prepare them for
an Islamic biological warfare attack which might
happen, but must not be spoken about.
The world we live in is stranger than fiction. It is
a place where imaginary threats are constantly
discussed but talk of real threats is silenced. No
one complains when the NYPD releases a Zombie Patrol
Guide, but a furor ensues when it investigates
terror-linked mosques. The more imaginary a threat
is, the safer it is to tackle it because there is no
Zombie Rights organization to sue, whine and conduct
interfaith rallies complaining that zombies are
people too.
"With an host of furious fancies whereof I am
commander, with a burning spear and a horse of air
to the wilderness I wander," Tom O'Bedlam sings. "By
a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to
tourney. Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end –
Methinks it is no journey."
We are led now by Bedlamites, feigned madmen running
a society of feigned madness where it is fashionable
to fight zombies and unfashionable to fight Muslim
terrorists. A society in which a 100 million dollar
movie that depicts Abraham Lincoln fighting vampires
was just released. And if it isn't vampires or
zombies, then it's monsters or aliens. We need our
phantom enemies to fight and defeat; the knights of
ghosts and shadows who call us to battle beyond the
wide world's end of reality to avoid fighting the
all-too-real terrorists of the Jihad.
To fight ghosts and shadows, zombies, aliens and
vampires, is no journey at all. It can be done at
home or at the movie theater. The lights go down and
sound blares, adrenalin levels spike and pupils
dilate, and, when the two hours are complete, the
experience of confronting and surviving danger has
been burned in and all the appropriate chemicals are
swirling around in the body. While outside the
terror grows.
More than ever, we are glutted on a feast of false
victories against false enemies, while the true
enemy remains nameless. While moviegoers in Times
Square consumed cinematic fantasies about invaders
from outer space, a real life invader from Pakistan,
Faisal Shahzad, was plotting to set off a car bomb.
Like so many invaders from outer space, Faisal
Shahzad was able to blend in with the locals while
plotting to destroy everything around him.
In movies, invaders from outer space escape notice
because no one believes in aliens, but in real life
invaders from Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia
escape attention because it's unfashionable to
believe in Islamic invaders, no matter how many
times they have struck in the past. 36 percent of
Americans polled believe that aliens have visited
earth and 55 percent believe that most Muslims in
this country are patriotic citizens. It is still
unknown how many believe that little green men in
UFO's are also patriots and wave the red, white and
blue in between bouts of cattle mutilation.
Reality isn't a consensus, but responding to it is.
If enough people stop believing in gravity or if
acknowledging gravity as an invention of a bunch of
dead white men becomes politically incorrect, then
the rate at which objects fall will remain unchanged
but the rate at which people jump from buildings
expecting to fly will increase. If we don't believe
in Muslim terrorists, they will still go on blowing
themselves up and taking us with them, but our
authorities will courageously go on ignoring them
while jokingly issuing zombie warnings.
And yet reality can't be ignored. The very act of
ignoring it builds up unacknowledged tensions that
must be discharged. The average citizen working
through those anxieties sits in a darkened room
watching the end of days unfold, sees his cities
fall and society plowed under and steps out of the
air-conditioned theater into the warm sunshine
feeling a temporary lifting of unspoken fears.
With the dollar low, debt high, terror everywhere
and freedom nowhere; anxiety isn't hard to come by
and even harder to escape. Most of the anxieties are
the work of a political and cultural elite that
likes to think that it is best fit to govern, when
it is actually every bit as inept as the worst
Ottoman and Imperial Chinese bureaucracies. It is
especially dangerous to speak out against inept
elites, because the inept kind are also the most
insecure. Instead the anxieties must be sublimated,
spoken of only in fantasy critiques of inept
governments, corrupt cities, rampaging invaders and
bold criminals who can only be restrained by
assertive individuals.
Art is more than aesthetics, it is the stories
that a culture tells itself, it is the loves and
hates, the hopes and fears, the bright dashes of
color and the oppressive tones of shadow, it is the
note that lifts and then sinks reenacting the drama
of life. It is the space where even the unspoken
things can be spoken indirectly. It is a place where
hunters slay fell beasts, maidens drown themselves
for love and where the tribe reminds itself of its
strengths and fears. It is a place of many lies
concealing a few dangerous truths. The dangerous
truth that our culture's art conceals and reveals is
the truth that we are at war.
H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" begins by
drawing a picture of a complacent world of men who
give little thought of what might be out there, who
pay no attention to the
"envious eyes" of the invaders that "slowly and
surely drew their plans against us". We are aware
and unaware of being at war, of passing men and
women on the street who are slowly and surely
drawing up their own plans against us. In the movie
theater, we revisit that terrible knowledge that we
are engaged in a war with no natural end under a
hundred disguises. We recreate September 11 in our
ten-dollar nickelodeons every summer and look to the
sky. But it isn't aliens we are watching for. It's
planes.