The Willing Suspension of Disbelief
for release 01-05-05
Washington D.C.
The secret to survival in today's world is being able to tell the difference between science and science-fiction. It's not as easy as it once was to tell reality from the special effects.
The first time that I saw the movie Shrek, I was amazed by the realism of the animation for about the first five minutes, then I totally bought into the illusion. The subtle and nuanced motion of the characters from their body movements to their facial expressions to the way the light caught their hair, made it completely believable. But there were no characters or bodies or faces or light or hair. It was all illusion. The only things that were real were the voices.
What I am illustrating here is the fact that as illusions become more and more sophisticated, it becomes easier and easier to accept them as truth. Several examples come to mind. The War on Terror. Tax 'reform.' Consider the elaborate staging of the president's little music video which shows him landing on the aircraft carrier in his macho flight suit and declaring victory in Iraq under a banner saying Mission Accomplished. That was about fifty thousand casualties ago. Or how about WMD? Now there was a willing suspension of disbelief. BushCo ignored all empirical evidence and plunged into war anyway.
Just last night I was watching the evening news. By now I expect the evening news to be peppered with advertisements for snake-oil drugs that are invented to cure diseases which were likewise invented. But on last night's news there was an ad trying to sell me a drug to cure 'restless leg syndrome.' Oh, I might suspend my disbelief to the point where I accept that there is a purple pill to relieve my heartburn or a blue one to give me a hard-on, but RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME? C'mon.
Sometimes I think that you can sell anything to the compliant American consumer. I'm not talking just about SUV's and endless gasoline and geegaws from China sold in the Wal-Mart or the notion of Intelligent Design. You can make the one sucker who is born every minute believe that Ashley Simpson has talent, or that Jenny Craig will make them slim or that the Ab Cruncher or the tooth whitener will have the girls lining up outside their door, or that there is a pill to cure any ailment from which they are convinced they are suffering. It's the willing suspension of disbelief.
The War on Terror is much like the Restless Leg Syndrome. It is a disease that was invented in order to sell the cure. In the panic after 9/11 BushCo sold us the red, white and blue pill. It's hard to tell science-fiction from science-fact.
Here is another example of junk science. The Dept. of Defense is funding a project to develop a stealth lie detector. This is supposedly a device that could be aimed at people at random and by means of laser beam technology and would be able to sniff out their evil intentions. It would seem that the last thing that the boys at BushCo would want is a lie detector that can be focused on an unwitting subject, say Scott McLellan or Gdub himself.
The polygraph is pure voodoo and the idea that we could focus a laser on an unsuspecting subject and determine if they are up to no good is double voodoo. It has always struck me as ironic that the machine purporting to determine the truth is itself a lie. The lie detector was invented by a science-fiction writer. Real scientific tests have shown that lie detectors are almost as accurate as flipping a coin. Let me look someone in the eye and I can tell you more accurately if they are telling the truth than a machine can.
Once, The Poet's Eye saw Sir Lawrence Olivier on Tonight Show. He was talking to Johnny Carson about the time he saw Harry Houdini performing at the London Palladium. Olivier said that Houdini was a terrible illusionist but such a great showman that he made you believe in the illusion. He described the famous trick where Houdini would make an elephant disappear. They would lead the elephant out and then two guys would roll the big box onto the stage. Houdini would put the elephant in the box and do his magic gestures and then show the audience that the box was empty. After that twenty guys would roll the 'empty' box off the stage. The audience was amazed. It was a willing suspension of disbelief.
"...it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
