CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Jan. 1, 2005 – 9:37 a.m.
Review of the News: In 2004, Satirists Had a Ball with Homeland Security Clichés
By David C. Morrison, Special to CQ Homeland Security
We’re only three years into the post-9/11 epoch and the cyber-jihad story has already aged into a journalistic cliché, as witnessed by The Christian Science Monitor’s far from novel Nov. 24 disclosure that “al Qaeda is using the Internet ... with growing speed, volume, and sophistication.” Or, for that matter, Fox News’ Oct. 22 account of the Montana mother of three who “spends her free time hunting down terrorists on the Internet using 23 different aliases.”
In more secular circles, of course, everyone understands that the Internet is as much a direct pipeline for parodies as pornography. In an irreverent culture in which everyone who should be working is actually Web surfing with a finger perpetually poised over the “forward” button, notopic is too grim to spawn some topical and often tasteless gag propagating across the World Wide Web.
One phenomenon that has repeatedly struck CQ Homeland Security’s mediaminder — besides the sad reality that there is still no journalistic consensus on how to spell “al Qaeda”—is the endless supply of grist that the terror war has generated for the unremitting mills of the nation’s many amateur and professional satirists.
If humor truly is a mechanism by which we confront our fears, it seems apt that a central target of this on-line lunacy tends to be the jihadis themselves.
“Osama bin Laden has slammed U.S. pilots who have been carpet bombing near his cave ... [saying] that it is pointless taking out a contract for cable TV, if he is unable to get a clear picture,” The Spoof reports — while Broken Newz has Britain’s radical imam, Abu Hamza al-Mazri, being charged “with 20 offences, including stirring up racial hatred and ‘possessing a hideous hook for a hand.”
Fears of possible terrorist attacks, The Onion would have us believe, “led organizers of the Sept. 27-30 al Qaeda International Convention to take unprecedented security measures,” even as a drop-jawed Weekly World News discloses that “terrorists have formed their own airline — because they’re afraid of getting on a plane that could be hijacked by other terrorists!”
Broken Newz, again, has K-Tel marketing “a ‘Best of’ of Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s speeches, rants, invocations, incitements and hate-filled incomprehensible babblings.”
Just as prevalent are on-line parodies twitting U.S. conduct of the terror war. The Onion, for one, is relentless in hounding embattled Pentagon chief Don Rumsfeld. One such item finds Rumsfeld announcing a new strategy of fighting terror with terror: “You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” Rumsfeld growls “in a grainy and degraded videotape message filmed at an unknown location and released to CNN.”
Another Onion story has “Rumsfeld sheepishly [admitting] that he’s looking forward to National Secretary’s Day on April 21.” And a hilarious third exclusive portrays the “enigmatic mastermind” opening up his fortified headquarters on “Fang Island” to participants in his second no-holds-barred martial arts tournament—and declaring “the tournament open by symbolically shattering a block of obsidian with his prosthetic dragon’s claw.”
News to Spies
Small surprise, America’s spy chiefs have won themselves even less Internet respect. “After careful analysis, the now-famous President’s Daily Brief from August 6, 2001 seems to reveal that the CIA relies heavily on a previously-unknown intelligence source, code-named ‘TV News,’” ScrappleFace thus reports, while Broken Newz has “the Congressional panel investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks grilling members of the Psychic Network for five hours over the apparent failure of that organization to predict the actions of al Qaeda.”
For its part, Ridiculopathy has ex-CIA chief George Tenet stepping down to accept a new post as “Fall Guy In Chief,” and Bongo News cuts right to the chase, reporting that “after enduring months of open rebellion at CIA headquarters in Langley, the Bush Administration sent in its soldiers to clean out the leakers and treasonists.”
Launching its much-ridiculed color-keyed Homeland Security Advisory System in 2003, DHS threatened the livelihood of satirists everywhere with a decisive if apparently unintentional bit of self-parody. In any event, everyone loves an easy target, and so News Hax reports the advent of a more user-friendly system in which “McGruff the Crime Dog will give the daily Terror Outlook for the next five days,” and The Washington Dispatch finds the familiar color-coding replaced by a “Cups of Coffee” scale.
Utterly Wrong
Newsweek comedian Andy Borowitz has “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” fashionista Carson Kressley questioning DHS chief “Tom Ridge’s choice of orange for the current terror alert, calling the color ‘wildly unflattering.’” Under Iraq’s 10-level advisory system, The Onion observes, the current “Code Yellow-Orange” means “citizens living in towns with populations of 1,500 or more should prepare for the smoke of burning vehicles to obscure the sun.”
The very concept of threat alerts — based as they have so often been on the most tenuous of indicators — has invited an equally merciless drubbing. “Residents of Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Pearl Harbor should be on high alert after new intelligence indicates they may be targets of the next terrorist attack,” DeadBrain thus blares.
Citing the prophecies of French astrologer Nostradamus, Tom Ridge “says he foresees grave dangers in November,” Bongo News similarly broadcasts.
The Weekly World News warns that “tiny, bearded terrorists from the Middle East are infiltrating the United States—disguised as garden gnomes,” and Broken Newz has Target Stores announcing a “corporate name change to ‘Uhh ... Who, Me?’ as part of an overall plan to adopt a lower public profile.” The Onion, for its part, airs Wisconsin sheriff Virgil ‘Butch’ Steinhorst’s firm belief that “a recent rash of Baraboo-area crimes was perpetrated by the al Qaeda terrorist network or teenagers.”
Paint it Black
Just as no few proposed counterterror measures have succumbed to the giggle factor, the fear factor or both — remember Total Information Awareness? The terrorism futures market? The CAPPS II passenger pre-screening system? — parodists have gleefully piled onto an already over-burdened stupid security bandwagon.
“President Bush has hit upon a cunning plan to shield the White House from terrorist attacks. He wants to paint it solid black!” the indispensable Weekly World News informs. “Following its implementation of US-VISIT, the Bush administration is to introduce further security measures to screen out unwanted guests [by requiring] an on-the-spot urine sample,” DeadBrain claims to have learned. “As George W. Bush turns the dial on his paranoia amplifier to 11, yet more flights have been cancelled throughout the civilized world, and also in America,” another, even more caustic DeadBrain item tells.
Waiting Lines
Beset as it is with controversies over exploding shoes and underwire bras, airline security generally has proved a target-rich environment for satirists.
“United by their recent run-ins with the U.S. air passenger watch list,” Cat Stevens and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., “are planning to unite in protest: by singing songs condemning the No Fly List,” The Spoof spoofs. “American Trans Air Flight 282 from Chicago-Midway to Newark took a turn for the tedious Monday,” The Onion reports, “when undercover air marshal Kirk Gillam was drawn into a conversation about passenger Terrence Delsman’s patio for the majority of the two-hour flight.”
If, indeed, the 9/11 attacks signaled the “end of the age of irony”—as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter now wishes he had never declared — it should not startle that terror war parodies are sometimes mistaken for real news. In September 2002, The Onion purported to cover the CIA’s acquisition of “a videotape showing suspected al Qaeda operatives engaging in what appears to be telemarketing,” including shots of “Ayman al-Zawahiri ... making what appear to be cold calls from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.”
“Upon seeing the story,” Wired News later reported, “the Branch County sheriff’s department in Coldwater, Mich., which had been investigating telemarketing scams targeting the elderly, issued an urgent press release” — which, in turn, sparked a wave of real news stories about the terror alert pompted by an Internet joke.
Truth Is as Truth Does
Fully conscious that we inhabit an era in which truth is often so much weirder than parody, we here at CQ Homeland Security are still on the fence about the veracity of another recent Onion item: “Terrorist chatter about a possible al Qaeda attack against the U.S. deteriorated into gossip Monday,” federal intelligence officials tell the weekly, adding that the gossip is a “definite improvement” over the “glut of small talk about recipes, children, and goats that dominated conversation at this time last year.”
David C. Morrison, whose daily “Behind the Lines” column compiles all the media coverage of homeland security, can be reached at davidcmorrison@verizon.net.
Source: CQ Homeland Security
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