Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 23, 2002

Worth repeating

Media expert Douglas Kellner of the University of California at Los Angeles delivered a Sept. 12 lecture about “The World after Sept. 11” for the Center for Humanities and Arts. Some excerpts:
“There’s no question that Sept. 11 was a global media spectacle. Like the Gulf war, it was a global event. Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s talked about the global village, where suddenly all of the world is connected, in cable and satellite television networks, in the Internet and other communications. . . . And you have to understand terrorism: this is what they tried to do. They tried to get publicity, to do a global media spectacle, to instill fear in populations. I have some worry that the media has been a vehicle for hysteria, and to some extent the Bush administration, with all of these warnings. . . . This could be terrorist propaganda, lies, just to scare us. . . . This is what terrorism tries to do, to instill fear into people and to use the media to spread and propagate the fear, which means the media has to be responsible in not generating hysteria. . . .
“You need multi-causal analysis to explain things. . . . Some people say the reason to go into Iraq is oil. . . . But there’s also geopolitics—there are people in the current Bush administration who really want to rule the world. They see the U.S. as the last major superpower and they think it is our duty, our destiny, to rule the world. That’s a geopolitical view. Others say it has to do with Bush getting re-elected. The economy is pretty bad . . . and people vote their pocketbook, so Bush needs a big victory. So all of these factors go together—that’s my theory lesson for today. Multi-causal factors drive things like the Gulf war, and it’s a mistake to reduce them to one. You need to see the complexity of how these different things interact. . . .”

—Beth Roberts

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