Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
If we want to beat terrorism, it's time to deploy urban legends.
Nov 30, 2001 | Almost three months after Sept. 11, there are still no stupid ideas in the fight against terrorism. We can celebrate the apparent fall of the Taliban, but it won't be long until we remember that it wasn't the Taliban who attacked America. It's hard to imagine what a broader, enduring strategy might be, and the government has stopped just short of coming 'round the house looking for ideas. In this spirit, we owe it to ourselves to consider some less conventional approaches. The government's already hired Hollywood for its creative vision; why not enlist the rest of us for our tireless -- and suddenly valuable -- rumor mongering?
We saw Sept. 11 shut down almost everything; one of the few institutions to thrive immediately afterwards was the urban legend. CNN couldn't report them fast enough, and we took it upon ourselves to pass along stories: the child who predicted the attacks, the FBI agents who had advance warning, the man who miraculously "rode" the falling World Trade Center safely to the street. We're still spreading stories, albeit less frantically, and it doesn't take a business degree to recognize this energy as an untapped resource.
My father recently told me about the friend of a friend in line at a 7-Eleven in Rappahannock County, outside Washington. This friend found herself behind another customer, a man of Middle Eastern descent, who was short one dollar.
The woman handed him a dollar from her purse. The Middle Eastern man reluctantly accepted the money and thanked the woman profusely. She said he was welcome. He paid and left. Minutes later, in the parking lot, the woman discovered that the man had waited for her.
"You have been incredibly kind," he said, "and I would like to send you the money as soon as I return home."
"Don't be silly. No need to send me anything," she said.
"In that case, please allow me to tell you something." He lowered his voice. "Stay out of Washington tomorrow."
I told my father that the story was an urban legend, and that it had not only circulated the country with various geographical permutations -- Rappahannock County; New York; Boise, Idaho; Orlando, Fla. -- but had made the rounds in other terror-plagued countries long before Sept. 11. In England, a version of the encounter replaced the Middle Easterner with a grim Irishman, and so forth.
As memes go, the myth of the benevolent Arab transmits exuberantly. The idea of an almost-remorseful terrorist sounding a warning to one lucky American resonates so deeply that we willingly overlook its inconceivability. As Barbara Mikkelson points out on the Snopes Urban Legends Web site,
In real life, terrorists do not share their plans with those who might or might not end up caught in them because the potential cost of a warning -- the disruption of their schemes -- is deemed far too high. Terrorists view those who die as collateral damage, and although they may regret a particular death more than another, the potential for that regret does not sway them, not even to the point of issuing a small caution to an especially favored innocent.
Other variations on the benevolent Arab tale are equally implausible, like the one where a young Middle Eastern man warns his ex-girlfriend not to fly on Sept. 11, or to enter any American malls on Halloween. The throng of legends that followed the attacks have been well-documented, and well-dissected: We divide our time between picturing the next attack and imagining its prevention; the intersection we've devised is a lone, human terrorist. At the local 7-Eleven we find a way out of what otherwise appears hopeless. Give an Arab a dollar and we might just live a long, happy life.
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