Denial's Greatest Hits: Hiroo Onoda, Elwood P. Dowd And Lloyd Christmas
f you look through pop culture and history, it turns out we have a real soft spot for those in denial—seeing things that aren’t there, not seeing things that are screamingly obvious, blaming the wrong culprits for problems, and simply not accepting apparent truths. All of those are earmarks of denial, as defined a century ago by Sigmund Freud and his daughter, Anna. Here are six of my all-time faves whose traits could well be inspiration for today’s climate deniers.
This Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer not only inspires climate denial, but he may have had a hand in John Belushi’s pep talk in the film Animal House. World War II wasn’t over until he decided it was over, and that was in 1974. They lived off the land, swiping food from farmers, killing 30 civilians along the way. Onoda ignored the efforts of search parties and leaflet drops, dismissing them all as enemy tricks, until his elderly World War II commander was brought into the jungle to order him home. I’ve always been intrigued by his story. It could translate quite well to climate denial, when the last denier gives up the ghost in 2107, at Orlando, the southernmost point in Florida.
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Constructing an alternate reality: Elwood P. Dowd and Harvey.
Climate denial thrives in part because it lives in its own parallel universe: Don’t like what scientists are saying about sea level rise? Create your own shadow IPCC. Don’t like what you see from renewable energy? Turn the government’s half-billion dollar blunder on Solyndra into a blunt instrument—all enabled by a gullible network of talkshows, blogs, and Fox News. It seems so odd, but alternate realities are an old story in Hollywood.
A wildly successful Broadway play in the late 1940’s, “Harvey” became a hit movie in 1950. Dowd, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a gentle inebriate who spends his time in the company of a mischievous six-foot tall, bi-ped rabbit that no one else can see. Elwood acknowledges his alternate world in the end, memorably saying “I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor. And I’m happy to state that I finally won out over it.”
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http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2015/11/commentary-denial2019s-greatest-hits-volume-one
