Ashland Author Dean Ing sends a message. Trump got it.
 |
| Predicted the future |
Back in 1978 Ashland, Oregon author Dean Ing wrote Soft Targets, a book of uncanny prescience. He predicted war with Islamic non state actors who would target civilians, not military targets. The book was published right before the American embassy in Iran was overtaken and some 50 American civilians were taken as hostages.
The book predicted the near future but Dean Ing, who has a Ph.D. in communication and focused on psycholinguistics, said the solution to stop the terror was for American media to treat hostage-takers as pathetic losers, not as brave warriors. The worst thing to do, he wrote, was to explain the monstrosity of their actions and to explain their motives. That would turn them into heroes, warriors, fighters for a cause.
 |
| Dean Ing |
No, he said, instead treat them as weaklings, comic in their pathetic struggle to be manly.
Ing predicted the upcoming struggle of the next decades--the pushback of Islamic nationalism against Western globalism. He also predicted the tactics--disruption of life in the West with attacks by non-state actors on soft targets, i.e. civilians.
What he got partly wrong was Western media: He did not anticipate how the 24-7 news cycle would create a demand for Breaking News, with high drama that pits frightening villains against the public. In Soft Targets he predicted the media would cooperate and adopt his prescription: trivialize and mock terrorists. But TV stations don't cooperate. They compete for audience. Fear sells. The demands of grabbing TV audience require high stakes, and vivid villains, and danger. Masked men holding machine guns and public executions by beheadings provide the drama that holds an audience.
The 2016 campaign displayed a partisan divide in messaging, one which the GOP won handily. Obama and Hillary Clinton missed the public mood when they attempted to contextualize terror events. The public read their reaction to be inadequate, and worse, as excusing terror. They created an opportunity for all the GOP candidates to express the universal opinion of the news media, that terrorist attacks were terrible, breaking news horror in our faces. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Christie competed to say who would respond most "viciously,", the word Trump savored. Rubio called it a war of civilizations, Christie called Obama weak and feckless, Cruz said the sand should glow, Trump said he would bomb them to shit.
That was then.
 |
| Click Here for Video Clip, from RT, the Russian news outlet |
Somehow, the advice Dean Ing gave 37 years ago has re-emerged with Trump. There is no reason to suspect that Trump read Ing, or for that matter any book, but he does understand messaging. Trump understands that terrorists want to be proud of their service, that they see themselves as warriors and martyrs. Instead, Trump would deny them that. Describe them as losers, as clownishly weak, as pathetic.
Trump: "I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. They would think that’s a great name. I will call them from now losers because that’s what they are, and we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers,"
That is pure Dean Ing, right from Soft Targets.
 |
| 2015: Mixed message |
Terror incidents in Europe and the US have been carried out primarily by young men eager to make a grand statement. The Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, and the 9-11 hijackings relate to Islamic radicalism but one can also include the Charleston church shooting by a white racist and Timothy McVey's militia-based Oklahoma City bombing. Trump wants to deny them warrior status. Instead, send a message to young people considering ISIS that they will be considered losers, not heroes.
Dean Ing has a record of close predictions. Before the Iran hostage-taking there was Soft Targets. Before drone airplanes were in the news there was Butcher Bird. He predicted tiny--insect sized--weaponized drones before they became news. These have come true.His first books predicted nuclear war on American soil.
1 comment:
Spot on observation but I'd go a bit further and make a judgement about the motives. Calling names is the tactic of a bully, and is used to shore up a fragile ego. But worse than that it's inaccurate. Focusing on the perpetrators misses the larger issue of Western complicity with the repressive regimes of the Middle East, including the role of Russia as they exploit the the unrest to further their expansionist ambitions. Until these root causes are recognized and addressed we, Europe, the U.S. and allies, will continue to be the target of "losers", who by their desperate acts of self-destruction are winning in one area: the contraction of freedoms in the civilized world.
Post a Comment