Just a Joke
26 March 2008 - 20 אדר ב' 5768 by Huw
Take a listen to RadioLab’s new show on the War of the Worlds. They start with the classic radio broadcast of the tale by Orson Welles in 1938 and the panic it caused. Then they go on to all the other times the show was pitched on the radio and caused a panic. They even talk about a 1968 broadcast in Buffalo that caused so much panic the Canadian army was pulled up to the Peace Bridge - and the other two NY-ON bridges - to repel extraterrestrial invaders.
The question, of course, is why we get sucked in by such. And, of course, no one would fall for that now - until they start talking about the Blair Witch Project.
It’s the telling of tales that seems to be our downfall: we love to listen to stories. We get sucked in and pulled into the story so hard that as unbelievable as it is, we live it. They have a White Coated Expert™ talk about the psychology of it, discussing a James Bond movie. But I have many such experiences: my DVD library is filled with discs that I prefer to own exactly because they allow me to live something other than my daily life. I love the TV show Alias because of that, or MASH or Roseanne. I love reading The Lord of the Rings or listening to The Illuminatus Trillogy.
The problem comes not from tales or even tale-induced panic (although they talk about 6 deaths resulting from War of the Worlds). That’s the way we’ve been wired since the Monolith first taught us to use bones as weapons - maybe even longer. The problem comes from our unwillingness to use critical thinking - to accept any tale at face value as true and to act on that acceptance as if we had a verifiable, scientific fact.
Instead of a belief.
And an unfounded one at that.
And, I wonder, how this all ties into things we may want to believe without evidence anyway. I think of the “James Tomb” or the “Holy Thorn” relic or even the myth of the “Holy Cross” and all the other “really historical” things we Christians venerate. Or even the stories of the Bible and how much we want to believe them and therefore they must be true, really.
Religion never comes up in the show, but RadioLab logically points to current newscasts and how they duplicate the experience of it all. But they also hint at 9/11.
I think there’s a lot there for us to chew on.
amazing. dad and I were just talking about war of the worlds this morning: I can see the terrorists emerging from the spaceship at this very moment….