BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID
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Be Afraid Very Afraid
by Daren Foster
Fight.. Fear. Fight.. Distress. Fight.. Chaos. Fight with the Canadian Forces.
Go.. Go Fight.. Go. Fight. Win!!
It’s now official. According to recent television ads, the Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers. That’s so Cold War. Our fighting men and women have morphed into video game warriors, shot in grainy, hi-def black and white, kicking down terrorists’ doors, tracking down high seas drug smugglers, ski-dooing in V-formation up to defend our northern borders. We’re hard-asses, baby, and there’s no life like it.
Employing a little bit of the old bait-and-switch, these commercials exhort us to fight fear by inducing fear. Danger lurks everywhere, in the backstreet warrens of some nameless Afghanistan town, drug runners off our east coast, planes crashing into the mountains of British Columbia. Visual cues link external threats to our homeland security, deftly bringing to mind the post-9/11 call to arms: Fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here.
9/11. Nothing can flick on the fear button quicker or more effectively. Images from that fateful morning still elicit immediate adverse reactions. Horror. Outrage. Fear. Unedited, reflexive, visceral responses, plugging straight into the primitive, unevolved alligator part of our brains. Rational discourse is not possible. We are under attack. Our way of life, our entire belief system is threatened by murky, faceless foreign forces of regressive fanatics, intent -- like every James Bond bad guy -- on world domination. Don’t think, just be fearful.
Fight fear with fear.
When it comes to provoking the simplest, most basic emotions such as fear, nothing can hit that sweet spot like moving pictures. The old newsreels that ran before movies were unmatched in their ability to muster anti-Axis sentiment during World War II. Look at crazy Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the United Nations! That guy’s got his finger on the nuclear button over there? Duck and cover!! (Although actual footage shows him only banging his fist on the desk, the whole shoe angle makes it seem like he’s that much scarier and more unbalanced). JFK’s assassination was caught on film by Abraham Zapruder; fear and sorrow intermingle in a debilitating mixture of mourning for the passing of an era of possibilities.
Commercial spots with their ephemerality of pure unadulterated emotional manipulation, by their very nature blatantly end-run reason. Ignoring context first and foremost, they tap into what’s instinctive in us. Whether pulling on the heartstrings or activating our envy buttons, television ads take aim straight at the right-side of the viewers’ brains, the more emotional, impulsive, gut-instinct, Captain Kirk part of our nature.
The recent Canadian Forces commercials attempt to burrow into the illogical aspect of our collective psyches that it’s a perilous, film noir world out there, full of deranged people who take hostages, litter our streets with drugs and crash planes into the Rockies. We have no choice now. It’s time to cowboy the fuck up.
Compare this to a Canadian Forces ad from nearly 30 years ago, 1980. In it, joining the military seems like a wild weekend away with the boys, an extreme adventure where you get to ride helicopters, ride the waves and skydive. One of the last shots in the commercial depicts what could be a zany pool party. All the while, a song is sung / chanted to a tune that sounds like a cross between Monty Pythons’ Lumberjack Song and a Village People chorus, about there being no life like it.
But those were simpler times, kids. You see, a radical theocratic movement in Iran had just overthrown the U.S.-backed Shah and then seized the American embassy, taking 52 hostages for well over a year. The Soviet Union was creaking toward a possibly unstable breakdown, already mired in the initial stages of its invasion of Afghanistan during the twilight years of an increasingly feeble, neo-Stalinist leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Former movie star and Communist hater, Ronald Reagan, was heading for the White House, preparing to do battle with this Evil Empire. The Doomsday Clock ticked a few minutes closer to nuclear Armageddon.
Yep. Nothing to worry about here. Come on, join the army. It’ll be fun. Hell, we’ll even throw in a free university education to sweeten the deal.
Exactly what has happened to make us now such easy prey for the merchants of fear?
Yes, unlike back in the good ol’ days when we all blithely whistled a happy tune, safe from harm under the umbrella of that insanely perverse doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D. Get it?), our security has been breached here at home. We were attacked on our soil except that we weren’t. Canadians happily adopted the stance of being under threat from some nebulous, malevolent force, jealously striking out at us because they hate our freedoms and the fact we let our women go to school. Easier that than to see the lethal assaults of 9/11, London, Madrid and Bali as geo-political strikes in a battle to alter the global power structure, especially in the Middle East.
Fear is easy. Analysis isn’t.
The non-cynic in me would like to believe that it’s all simply been an unbelievably unfortunate and tragic confluence of events that has led to this sad, fearful present state of affairs. One that we will, with the passage of time and a solid dose of healthy introspection, work our way past. Try as I might I cannot fully accept the sinister notion that democratic leaders actively promote fear in their societies, believing that a scared population is a compliant population. Yet it’s hard to ignore the sentiment in highly charged recruitment ads and current event publications that exploit our fear to their advantage. (How’s that Peter Gabriel song go? Fear, she’s the mother of violence.)
Op-ed writers and letters to the editor have proudly applauded Canada’s return to the Golden Age of our Glorious Warrior past, where our fathers and grandfathers nobly faced down Nazi Germany. Setting aside the fact that the threat we face today is miniscule in comparison, along with the martial prowess we once possessed and hope to have again, back then there were leaders who told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. These days, all we can expect are empty schoolyard taunts like ‘you’re either with us or you’re against us’. Divide and Conquer. Cheap slogans easily digested in news sound bites and television commercials.Fighting, killing and being killed. There’s no life like it.
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