Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Spooking the paranoid

Ariel Dorfman made up a story about being detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security at Miami Airport. He told the story to 2000 "intellectuals" at a forum. He told this story because he was trying to highlight the "contradictions of intellectual life in our times of turmoil". He apparently figured he'd put enough clues in his story - that is made it absurd enough - that everyone would realize it was a fabrication. He was wrong.
It finally dawned on me how deeply my fictional account of detention by Homeland Security had resonated with unbridled fantasies inside the heads of so many of my colleagues. I doubted any were about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Great idea. Show up intellectuals for the self-obsessed loons many of them are, right? Well, unfortunately that's not what Dorfman wanted to do.
Yet there was no denying that my tale had tapped into a deep paranoia. If entirely rational men and women, experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings, believed me, it was because they had already imagined such a possible world. Not one of my friends and associates at the convention or afterward dismissed my tall tale as patently absurd. When I lamented the naivete of my sophisticated audience, the response was unanimous: I was the naive one.

Maybe they were right. My fraudulent yarn was apparently terrifyingly plausible in a country where citizens can be held indefinitely without charges, where wire-tapping without warrants is rampant, where the vice president defends the use of torture, and where the president invades another country under false pretences.
Gimme a break. Dorfman's logic is flawed where he assumes that these people are "entirely rational". What evidence does he have for that? That they're "experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings"? I think I'll need more than that, thanks.

Dorfman has done a public service by proving that many intellectuals are paranoid, egotisticalfantasistss even if he chooses not to accept this. If he had been speaking at a Star Trek convention he would have received a more rational response.