Keeping the U.S. in the Dark
By directing America's attention toward fictional boogeymen, Donald Trump scores political points and masks his own inability to deal with genuine threats.
There’s a scene in The Bad and the Beautiful, the 1953 potboiler about behind-the-scenes Hollywood, in which Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan have been assigned to make a B-movie horror picture called “The Duel of the Cat Men.” A crusty old costumer is trying to convince Douglas and Sullivan, as producer and director, that having actors dressed in raggedy old cat costumes is enough to fill the audience with terror.
But Douglas’ and Sullivan’s characters come to the conclusion that audiences will be much more afraid if they never even see the cat people, because it’s human nature to be more fearful of the unknown than it is to be afraid of what is visible. The premise is that people’s imaginations fill in the blanks with far more terrifying things than anything that might be spelled out f…
