JJB Blog

Douglas Rushkoff wrote a very interesting essay back in August of 2005, discussing how suidicide bombing is a media virus. The media virus concept is something he discussed in a book of the same name in 1994. It offers a very interesting model of how ideas/trends/behaviors spread through a culture through media.

The essay is a quick read. Here’s an excerpt:

Media viruses … depend on our newly complexified mediaspace to exist. Like biological viruses, they have two main components: a sticky outer shell, and genetic code inside. … The virus replicates if its code can successfully interpolate itself into the confused command structure of our cell’s own code. If the virus succeeds in doing this, it turns the cell into a virus factory — the cell commits suicide in the viruses[sic] name. Early Madonna successfully challenged our faulty, confused, and unarticulated notions about female sexuality. The Rodney King tape successfully challenged the unarticulated rage at the way white cops treat black inner-city men. The viral code replicates as long as we’re unable to talk about the underlying social agenda it provokes.

Suicide bombing is a media virus with very real effects. The sticky outer shell is the event itself — a suicide bombing gets covered on the news. It’s huge news, especially if it occurs in a white western nation. Currently, it’s the fastest spreading kind of news story there is.

The code, like that of any successful media virus, challenges the unarticulated confusion over the relationship of the west to oil, Arabs, Islam, and post-colonialism. Actually, the virus fuels itself on rage going back as far as the Crusades, or certainly since the imposition of CIA-sponsored dictatorships.

When issues remain closeted, culture-wide cognitive dissonance only increases. This makes everyone susceptible to the contagion of a virus whose code can nest within this highly charged gap. For a select few cells within the cultural organism, this means becoming a suicide bomber oneself. For others, it means seeing suicide bombers around every corner — as the accidental death of a Brazilian man in London, thought to be a suicide bomber, confirms.

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Saw this on boingboing:

(Noam Chomsky speaking about Bush)

So therefore you have… George Bush… this pampered kid who came from a rich family and went to prep school and an elite university. And you have to present him as an ordinary guy who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make–he didn’t talk that way at Yale–and a fake Texas twang, and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something. It’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about Chomsky. Most of the time he is so well researched, and then other times he is so anecdotal, making vague references to non-falsifiable conspiracy theories. Does he have any proof that George Bush makes grammatical errors on purpose? Furthermore, Chomsky has been hanging out at pretty fancy institutions his entire life, hasn’t he seen the rich and privileged barely-literate idiots that go in and out of those places?

Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly an elaborate plan to sell Bush as the President that you can relate to, the President who doesn’t talk too fancy.

If there is one thing Bush is great at, even when on the spot in public, it’s completely undermining the question that was asked and either not addressing anything, or steering the dialogue toward what he wants to talk about. He performs this pretty much flawlessly.

Which makes me see Chomsky’s point more. Hmmm.

I don’t know. I ask you, Dear Reader, is Bush’s idiocy an elaborate show?

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A poll conducted by an Iraqi university research team on behalf of the British government and reported by British newspapers showed that 45% of Iraqis support suicide bombers who attack coalition troops in Iraq. In some areas this rises to 65%. Iraqis are angry at the damage done to their country by the invading forces, and the decrease in standard of living, in freedom of movement and in safety and security which it has brought. Many Iraqis hope that if the coalition forces can be encouraged to leave, the country can return to normal.

This is in line with the findings of Robert Pape discussed in this article in The American Conservative. Pape has compiled a database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980.

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

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