In little more than a month, ISIS (aka ISIL, or IS, or Islamic State, or Islamic Caliphate) has changed little on the ground, while its image in American minds has morphed into a ginormous, imaginary monster capable of throwing a terrifying shadow of fear across the American continent thousands of miles away. This is not a rational perception, even though the president feeds into it (even if he knows better). This is panic, deeply rooted in comic book thinking.
Comic book thinking: never hard to find, but not always dominant
The Governor of Texas and other fear mongers, like Judicial Watch and Fox News, would have you believe there are agents of ISIS, the Islamic Caliphate, crossing the Rio Grande and making themselves at home in the American homeland undetected -- except by these fearless watchdogs. They also cite a rightwing provocateur who crossed the Texas border in terrorist costume and may have gone undetected. Republican Senator John McCain fulminated in comic book style about this imaginary security breach. The Homeland Security people say they detected him and knew he was a buffoon.
The Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee had hear more than enough by mid September. Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon of California used the 9/11 anniversary to imagine a worst case scenario: "I would much rather fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria today than fight them in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kurdistan tomorrow." With considerably bloodier clarity and recklessness, the 76-year-old showed his tough willingness to send young soldiers to die in Iraq yet again, urging "our coalition to go all-in now, so that we do not risk having to use enormously more blood and treasure later."
In an article about ISIS, the National Review published some articles of faith with headings like: "the growth of the Islamic State," "the Success of the Islamic State," and "the ascendancy of the Islamic State." The writer made an intellectually dishonest anti-Obama/pro-Bush argument rooted in unreality in which he characterized President Obama as an Islamist apologist and an unreliable war maker. That may be just as well in a world where "the success of the Islamic State" and, even moreso, "the ascendancy of the Islamic State" are hobgoblin projections of comic book fear with no objective reality.
The success of Fox News is built on comic book thinking. For example, on September 17, Fox touted an "intelligence bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange" warning, somewhat incoherently:
" that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for "lone wolves" to attack U.S. soldiers in America in recent months, citing one tweet that called for jihadists to find service members' addresses online and then "show up and slaughter them."
Reportedly Fox News coverage of the ISIS crisis has achieved ratings higher than CNN and MSNBC combined, where comic book thinking can sometimes be more nuanced. CNN resorts to unprovable fear-mongering to characterize ISIS as "the terror group that is striking fear into the hearts of leaders around the world," which if true would say more about world leaders than about ISIS. In contrast, the BBC accurately describes ISIS as "the small but fanatical jihadist army now controlling large tracts of Syria and Iraq" -- and then wonders, quite rationally, whether ISIS has the capability to govern an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania.
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