Dialogue: Chaos fires up false prophecies

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

The one sure consequence of crisis is confusion, and confusion is a boon to liars and psychotics. The liars' specialty is misinformation and with the speed of the internet and talkback radio that misinformation stretches a long way ahead of the truth.

Within hours of the disaster in the United States, a message was on the internet reinventing that most persistent and ridiculous of prophets, Nostradamus, whose only great skill was to write portentous, allusive and very vague predictions that could mean just about anything.

The message was: "In the year of the new century and nine months/From the sky will come a great King of Terror/The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city/In the city of York, there will be a great collapse/two twin brothers torn apart by chaos/while the fortress falls the great leader will succumb/third big war will begin when the big city is burning."

I first read it on the internet, and later that same day, Wayne Mowat - unknowingly rather than irresponsibly, I'm sure - read it on his National Radio programme, having received it by e-mail. I wearily heard other people repeating it, amazed by its miraculous accuracy; and so another lie had been launched with sufficient trajectory to carry it around the world.

I knew it was entirely spurious because every few years Nostradamus becomes briefly fashionable to meet what seems like an insatiable need for some people to believe in the paranormal. And I wondered how long before the truth would surface, if it surfaced at all, in the deluge of news and views over that first week.

Nostradamus was a 16th-century French astrologer and famous physician who wrote a book of predictions called Centuries - in rhyming quatrains in medieval French. Every scholarly examination I've read over the years about the book says it's basically gibberish.

It was the following week before a New York Times story reported that three separate editions of the prophecies of Nostradamus had become best-selling titles on Amazon.com. The internet message, said the newspaper, combined sentence fragments from different passages of Nostradamus' writings with words that were not his to create the impression that an astrologer 450 years ago had foretold this disaster.

So for at least seven days e-mails had rippled around cyberspace, amazing the unwary, many of whom will continue to think it must be true because so many people remarked on it, having heard it on the radio. Nostradamus will not go away, not because he has anything important to say but because so many people want to believe in the occult, no matter what.

Liars are at one level but psychotics and bigots are even more dangerous as they use confusion as a cover to commit acts of violence on innocent people because they think they have an excuse, like the man mentioned by novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who "went on the rampage crying, 'I'm an American' as he shot at foreign-born neighbours, killing a gentle Sikh man in a turban and terrifying every brown-skinned person I know".

Patriotism - so aptly described by Dr Samuel Johnson as "the last refuge of a scoundrel" - can also be used to exert pressure on those who may not want to go along with intemperate outbursts of public opinion. It seems to me that President George W. Bush has so emphatically and dramatically promised action against the terrorists that he may soon be forced to do something, no matter how ill-judged, or he will look politically impotent. That would give me pause were I an American.

Meanwhile, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who cast the only vote against handing over what she thinks are excessive powers to the President, has been verbally bullied by talkback hosts and their callers and has received so many death threats she's had to have additional bodyguards.

So many people prey on cheap emotions in times of confusion it takes courage to stop, think and make up your own mind.

Years ago, a close relative of mine had the opportunity to pay 10c to wear mufti instead of the uniform to school. He said he didn't think it was worth the money so was one of two among more than 1000 to go to school in uniform; and it worried him not a bit. A lot of kids tried to bait him, of course, because they could see their weakness reflected in his strength.

Another thing that saddens me is the indiscriminate use of "hero". The men who overpowered the hijackers on the plane, knowing it would cost them their lives, and a number of others who behaved with conspicuous disregard for their own safety at the time the buildings crashed were heroes by any measure of the word. But, gradually, the term embraced more and more people - the men who spent long hours picking through the rubble, and almost anyone involved in the rescue.

The trouble is, when everyone's a hero, nobody is.