Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3di8Vw15XY
This hidden camera reality show hired a young white actor to appear as a bigot, loudly, verbally abusing a young Muslim store worker (another actor). The premise was to see how bystanders reacted. The clip preludes with a quick intro mentioning the prevalence of racism towards Muslims specifically, even now, over a decade since 9/11 (this clip is from 12' I believe). The ABC show plays television news highlights about a mosque desecrated, and a man pushed to his death because the woman, "thought he was Muslim."
As the actor belittles and disrespects the "Muslim worker," many customers are horrified by the "racist's" treatment towards the store worker. However at 3:30 another white male in his mid-30s is the first to agree with the abusive actor.
Actor: "I'm worried about a bomb or something."
Man: "Yeah I don't trust any of them."
Actor": "There are a million of them, they all want to blow themselves up."
Man: "Yeah, I hear you, I know what you mean."
When confronted by the reality show host, the man says, "I agreed with him he was telling the truth. It's hard to see the difference between Muslim, terrorist [...] It's hard to decide who is who."
A member of the US army steps up to the counter at 5:00. He says to the white actor, "We live in America he can have any religion he wants [...] You have the choice to shop anywhere like he has to choice to practice any religion he wants. That's the reason I wear the uniform so that anyone can have the choice to live freely in this country."
After he is approached by the host the soldier tells him he "wasn't a hero, just being a person" based on defending the principles, "everyone's inalienable rights in this country, if you are American you are an American."
I don't own a television and am not much of a TV watcher, I'm not sure if this clip has any weight I thought it was just a great example of the mentality of us/them, and otherness that still remains in many people's minds today, not just hate towards Muslims, but other races, creeds and religions. While the soldier did step up and speak out he closed his lines with if you are American you are an American. Is that still creating a separation between the united states and citizens from other countries. I hope that he holds these lines of humanity towards non-American Muslims as well.
This brought to mind many points from Rey Chow's article, The age of the World Target:
"The violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self.
In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the second World War-- not only by US military personal but also by social and behavioral scientists- was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non Western others for centuries."
And of course one of her closing passages, ".... the truth of the continual targeting of the world as the fundamental form of knowledge production is xenophobia, the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond that is the bomber's own visual path."
The man in the clip has grouped all Muslims together as terrorists and or violent and expresses a fear of being bombed. Someone should inform this man just how the US military kills off those terrorists everything/one around them....
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"Thus while the dissenters focused on the horrors, potential and actual, of the bomb, and while they looked below the cloud to the blistered ground and the mortally wounded, the communications-outlets of the dominant culture kept their eyes on the cloud and they were awestruck. They found a category of response for this new Absolute, based no on destruction, but on power. And the moral implications of the bomb became correspondingly diminished because that older tradition of American sublimity had always relegated to Divinity the moral purpose behind nature and its products, leaving man (especially American man) to act out a predestined role in which no ultimate responsibility be taken."
(Peter Hales)
This is a nice picture. So pretty isn't it? I mean look at the way the explosion assimilates with the clouds on the horizon, reflects upon the water and transcends upwards, towards the heavens....
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"An atomic explosion became not a purely human circumstance (for which we must accept responsibility), but rather a part of that benign collaboration among man, nature and divinity that had defined American destiny, a predetermined even foreordained event." -(Hales)
Cindy Sheehan.
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"In this regard the American cold war is a particularly useful example of the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain-- perhaps intimidate is the best word-- the personal narratives of its population." (Nadal, Containment Culture).
A great example of the U.S. cold war's "nuclear gaze" and the fear that eyes are always on the individual, leading to extreme paranoia in communities like this, a town created by the US government that was composed of military research scientists and their families.
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"In attempts to keep the narrative straight, containment equated containment of communism with containment of atomic secrets, of sexual license, of gender roles, of nuclear energy, and of artistic expression [...]metonymically suggesting characteristics that will broadly manifest in many aspects of American culture...." -(Nadal, 6)
Some of the atomic bombs metonymical representations: Freedom, Capitalism, Christianity, Family, Heterosexual normalcy, Domestic production
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