“The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse”

That is Mark Steyn's name for the film loop that circles endlessly through the minds of many of the people trying to make sense of the world around them. Riffing off the same topic that Peggy Noonan did a few days ago, Steyn points out that many people in America relate not to how the world is, but how they think it is based on their movie and pop culture frame of reference. His starting point is a recent opinion piece written by Christopher Dickey in Newsweek entitled War and Deliverance. In it, Dickey makes a rather tortured metaphor about Dick Cheney as a wannabe hero, a la the Burt Reynolds character in the movie Deliverance. Everyone else is the Jon Voight character, just trying to make sense out of everything. Steyn is having none of it.

Christopher Dickey paints with a broad brush: "On a grand scale they [the administration] could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless." (Monitoring jihadist phone logs being the reinterpretation into meaninglessness, unlike, say, partial-birth abortion, which is merely an ancient constitutional right the founders had cannily anticipated a need for.) So one's first reaction to this is a faint flicker of surprise that Dickey doesn't see Cheney as the mountain man and the Constitution as his rape victim. One's second reaction is that the metaphor is dishonest. When it comes to "closet fantasies" about toppling Saddam, it's not Dick Cheney versus "the rest of us." Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the Iraq war resolution, there were a lot of folks auditioning for the Burt Reynolds role: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and almost every other prominent Democrat indulged in just as much "ersatz fortitude" about Iraq and its WMD as Dick Cheney ever did.

But the third and bigger point is that, enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot – but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse."

Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.

If Steyn is harsh with Dickey and the folks endlessly watching The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse running in their heads, he is utterly merciless with the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.

Every day the government manages to prove exactly how incompetent it can be yet the troofers believe that some sinister force was able to carry out a gargantuan demolition job – and keep it secret.  Never mind that such a powerful, ruthless organization would have long ago silenced the troofers, in their mental film loop they are the little guy who brings down the evil empire. Such drama. Such heroism. So little understanding of the real world and the real threats. So easily manipulated and led.

The sleazier politicians like Ron Paul and now Bill Richardson are trying to cater to those people that only have those pop-culture conspiracy theory frames of reference. Several other candidates kowtow to those who think all problems can be solved merely by wishing it to be so. So they campaign for more ethanol, even though using 510 pounds of corn to produce 13 gallons of fuel isn't a smart use of limited resources. Other failed politicians turn to Hollywood and produce a film full of lies and exaggerations, bypassing the mental film loops and supplying a new one directly. Leading the easily led into thinking that they are thinking for themselves as an art form.

Steyn closes with a powerful truth for the pop-culture types: "Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don't watch the same movies, and don't buy into the same tired narratives."

(Idiotic Dickey piece here.)