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Commentary: Dangerous Fantasies
A gullible belief in comforting fantasies has its political uses.
By William Marvel
My mother once told me that if I believed something strongly enough it would be true. I suspect now that she was referring to philosophical or metaphysical concepts, but I always thought in specifics, and what I wanted most in the world was a horse. I therefore set myself the task of believing that I owned a horse, which I soon accomplished, down to the details of the little stable where I kept him. Then I made the mistake of mentioning my trusty steed to my schoolmates; possibly I actually referred to him as "my trusty steed." That raised difficult questions from my companions, but loyalty to both my mother and my horse required continued credence, so I persisted in my equestrian pretensions. Finally, though, one literalist first-grade girl said, "Billy, everyone knows you don’t have a horse," and a circle of blank stares corroborated her. With that my noble beast vanished, along with his stable.
Soon thereafter I gathered from my grandmother, somehow, that the likenesses of the four presidents at Mount Rushmore were the result of felicitous natural erosion, and I believed it enough to repeat the assertion to those same schoolmates. They hooted hysterically, so I appealed to our bus driver, Percy, who had never failed as a wise and unbiased arbiter of our disputes. Percy allowed that he thought the four faces had actually been carved, and he went so far as to identify the sculptor. "Gutzon Borglum" sounded to me like a name that had been made up on the spot, and Percy did have a tendency to tease us, so I clung to my misapprehension for another day or so. I already knew better than to ask my mother, whose theories on telepathic materialization had already proven faulty, but the school encyclopedia soon sealed my embarrassment.
A stubborn willingness to believe in that which is palpably not true hobbled me for years. It kept me devoted to Santa Claus longer than most of my peers, abetted the Irish nuns who attended to my early Catholic indoctrination, and convinced me that I had a girlfriend while I was still in grammar school. I should note, however, that the girlfriend really existed, and she spoke to me at least three or four times over my last couple of years at Pine Tree School.
Unquestioning belief in convenient falsehoods has its purposes. It allows unwitting innocents to nurture and take pride in children whose paternity would astonish them. It relieves the owners of ego-soothing gas guzzlers from any fear that they are aggravating air pollution, or affecting the cost or availability of gasoline. It keeps millions of taxpayers supporting massive government bureaucracies with the falsehood that the people really matter to some chimeric council or Congress.
It is on the international scene that fantasy finds its greatest utility. Without it, the United States might have a decidedly dull history: it might not even exist, had it not been for the cultivated myth of British oppression. The fable that Mexican troops launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. forces justified the annexation of half of Mexico, without which a lot of Civil War historians would now be unemployed. The cherished misconception that Spanish terrorists planted a bomb on the U.S.S. Maine permitted the United States to righteously appropriate Spain’s Caribbean and Pacific colonies, while credence in a phony threat from the Axis Powers helped Woodrow Wilson hurl his reluctant country into war in 1917. But for that last pair of manufactured crises, there might now be no booming industry in World War II information and memorabilia.
Fortunately for future historians, movie producers, and relic dealers, fantasy continues to drive foreign policy. Saddam Hussein somehow aided the terrorist attacks of 2001; after all, he is at least technically Islamic. He had a vast arsenal of nukes and worse, and was about to use them on us. Now his enemies the Iranians are trying to build a similar arsenal, and no nation could possibly have a legitimate use for such weapons, so long as the United States stands ready to protect the world from evil (except in Africa).
Our nation shares one comforting, crippling fantasy with most of the Islamic states of the world: the delusion of divine favor. We have never blundered and have never acted in the wrong. We must always give our government full and unquestioning support, for the simple reason that we are never, ever, the "bad guys," no matter what we do.
William Marvel is a free-lance writer and U.S. Army veteran living in northern New Hampshire. He is the author of Andersonville: The Last Depot and, most recently, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War.
Posted Friday, May 19, 2006
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