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July 23, 2008
Exclusive: Book Excerpt: Speaking Truth to Liberal Power – Hollywood Paranoia and Reality
Hollywood Paranoia and Reality: The Federal Bureau of Incompetence (2002)
Remember those movies with titles like Enemy of the State, or Three Days of the Condor, or Clear and Present Danger? The hero is single-handedly up against a corrupt government agency which combines the power and scope of the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency into one sinister authority that's out to get him. You know the ones I mean, in which there are countless close-ups of computer screens and keyboards scanning through millions of records in the data base of the agency which discover not only our hero's Social Security number, but his bank account, his medical records, and his credit card account - all this in three or four seconds. Then they make all these vanish into thin air, thereby making him a non-person. They seem able to keep constant tabs on him, wherever he is in the world - visualizing him or listening to his thoughts at will - all by way of their omniscient computers. They can tell what kind of breakfast cereal he eats just by accessing his supermarket’s records and cross checking with the credit card he paid with.
With all this dazzling digital technology and nimble expertise, how can our hero hope to uncover the corruption in the omnipotent agency and triumph over the enemy within? He manages it somehow with a brilliant but simple McGuffin and the help of his beautiful and faithful girlfriend.
This paranoid model of our country's premium investigative agencies with their crushing omnipotence and dazzling omniscience, created by Hollywood over the past digital decade, came to a farcical end a few days ago when Special Agent Coleen Rowley - the FBI whistle-blower - testified in public before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Contrary to Hollywood's frightening depiction of our Federal investigative agencies as having the invasive motivation of Big Brother combined with the advanced technology and digital power of Darth Vader, the truth is that they are - the FBI at least - huge muscle-bound hulks that move with glacial rather than lightening speed on any important matter, and a random access memory of about 11 (that's 11 bytes, not 11 nanobytes) in the entire Bureau. The FBI as a whole appears to be a very dim bulb indeed. Perhaps not each individual agent, but the Bureau as a functioning organization.
Contrary to Hollywood's paranoid depiction, the Bureau cannot access its own data base made up of thousands of reports filed by its own field agents. Its search capacity is so primitive that it can only search for one term at a time. If, for example, one sharp-eyed agent found out that a suspicious young Middle Eastern man was trying to learn to fly commercial passenger planes and wanted to check around and get information about other aviation schools, he would be unable to check the reports of his fellow agents because the FBI search program would allow him to search only "aviation" or "schools" but not both together. Poor Director Mueller was clearly embarrassed at having to confess this pathetic fact. When asked, he hesitatingly declared that it might take the FBI two years to get its search capacity up to par.
But the unkindest cut of all came during Sen. Schumer's benign interrogation of Special Agent Rowley when he discovered that agents do not have the capacity to communicate by e-mail. They still use fax machines or snail mail. His jaw dropped and he shook his head sadly as he suggested that his 14-year-old daughter was better equipped technologically than the FBI.
How to account for the disparity between Hollywood's paranoid view and the pathetic reality?
Part of the answer can be found in man's enduring need to create and live by fantasy - reassuring fantasy. Throughout our careworn lives we must spin out daydreams to make the painful realities tolerable. We need to be told stories as children, and later as grownups we need to go to the movies to hear them told again. This infantile need results in the imagination and articulation of a core number of myths, fantasies, and daydreams that children in almost every culture share. One of these more or less universal myths consists of the following simple plot: there is the young hero, alone, smart, nimble, who wants to win the woman and the treasure which is guarded by an old(er) omnipotent ruler/guardian/authority. This triangular rivalry is the essential plot. It has repeated itself in countless forms from Gilgamesh to Star Wars. Jack and the Beanstalk is one of the simplest versions. Jack must overcome the omnipotent giant who is also "omniscient," i.e. he can "smell the blood of an Englishman." Jack outwits him, kills him, runs off with the goose that lays the golden eggs and he and his mom live happily ever after. Star Wars has pretty much the same plot, only souped up a thousand percent. There's Luke Skywalker who has to save Princess Leia from the Empire and the dark side of the force embodied by the omnipotent Darth Vader. In modern times the plot may vary a bit, but the basic schema persists. For example, in Casablanca Rick outwits the omnipotent Nazis and runs off with Louis, the dapper Chief of Police.
In our antinomial, post-sixties era the American government is the hated, omnipotent, omniscient authority, and its main power lies in its computers, which can see all, hear all, know all, and control all. This paranoid fantasy - the influencing machine - is as old as family life. It's the little boy's view of his powerful father, whose stuff he covets and who fears the old b***** can read his guilty mind and find out his illicit designs. From his childish viewpoint, he exaggerates the old man's power and capacities just as Hollywood exaggerates the power and capacities of the FBI. As boys grow up they come to see the disillusioning reality of their fathers' capacities - that they are only toothless old lions. Hollywood, however, never grows up.
Part of the answer can be found in man's enduring need to create and live by fantasy - reassuring fantasy. Throughout our careworn lives we must spin out daydreams to make the painful realities tolerable. We need to be told stories as children, and later as grownups we need to go to the movies to hear them told again. This infantile need results in the imagination and articulation of a core number of myths, fantasies, and daydreams that children in almost every culture share. One of these more or less universal myths consists of the following simple plot: there is the young hero, alone, smart, nimble, who wants to win the woman and the treasure which is guarded by an old(er) omnipotent ruler/guardian/authority. This triangular rivalry is the essential plot. It has repeated itself in countless forms from Gilgamesh to Star Wars. Jack and the Beanstalk is one of the simplest versions. Jack must overcome the omnipotent giant who is also "omniscient," i.e. he can "smell the blood of an Englishman." Jack outwits him, kills him, runs off with the goose that lays the golden eggs and he and his mom live happily ever after. Star Wars has pretty much the same plot, only souped up a thousand percent. There's Luke Skywalker who has to save Princess Leia from the Empire and the dark side of the force embodied by the omnipotent Darth Vader. In modern times the plot may vary a bit, but the basic schema persists. For example, in Casablanca Rick outwits the omnipotent Nazis and runs off with Louis, the dapper Chief of Police.
In our antinomial, post-sixties era the American government is the hated, omnipotent, omniscient authority, and its main power lies in its computers, which can see all, hear all, know all, and control all. This paranoid fantasy - the influencing machine - is as old as family life. It's the little boy's view of his powerful father, whose stuff he covets and who fears the old b***** can read his guilty mind and find out his illicit designs. From his childish viewpoint, he exaggerates the old man's power and capacities just as Hollywood exaggerates the power and capacities of the FBI. As boys grow up they come to see the disillusioning reality of their fathers' capacities - that they are only toothless old lions. Hollywood, however, never grows up.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Yale Kramer, a former faculty member and graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, psychoanalyst and former Clinical Professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is the author of Talking Back to Liberal Power. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Spectator and The Public Interest.
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