Confabulation

Confabulation It is the fabrication or distortion of memory about oneself or the world, a belief in the fantastic, maybe even the demonstrably untrue, usually without conscious intent to deceive. Donald Trump's slander of Jersey City Muslims cheering the fall of the twin towers on 911 is an example. I'll leave it to others to speculate whether Mr. Trump actually believes he saw film clips of Muslims cheering, I have no doubt that many in his audience sincerely believe they did. I'm old enough to know that memory plays tricks. I grew up in a small town that had, and still has, an annual peach festival. One year the festival included a concert featuring a gospel quartet called the Blackwood Brothers. It was held in a hanger at the municipal airport. The singers arrived in a private DC3, still in use as a passenger airliner at the time and a novelty for our town. They offered airplane rides for those interested and a number of people took them up on it. The DC3 has a tail wheel, which means it's center of gravity is behind the main landing gear. On landing it has a tendency to turn and go tail first down the runway. That's called a ground loop. The pilot has to be alert to prevent it and that pilot lost control on one of the landings. As the airplane turned one wing touched the ground. The airplane flipped over and caught fire. The passengers were trapped inside and burned to death. I'm pretty sure I didn't witness the crash but I did see the smoldering wreckage later and heard people talking about what had happened. I have a vivid memory of the actual crash and can hear the passengers screaming in pain. I also have an inordinate fear of fire. It terrifies me in the way some people are terrified of heights, or spiders. Confabulation can have damaging effects, intentional or not. It can also be used. Joseph Goebbels, the master Nazi propagandist, understood that. He wasn't the only one and Jews have been its victims for centuries. The blood libel, the lie that Jews sacrifice non-Jewish children in their rituals and drink their blood, has been a feature of anti semitism at least since medieval times. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery from the nineteenth century purporting to document a Jewish plot to control the world is still widely circulated, and widely believed. Clear minded people know none of it is true. We also know racism was not a factor in most of the incidents fueling the Black Lives Matter movement. But racial relations are worse than they have been in decades. One campus rape story after another has been debunked yet the myth of an epidemic has persisted to the point where basic rules of due process are being suspended. To be accused is to be convicted. As in my case, confabulation often begins with an element of reality. There is no question the 911 atrocities were carried out by men who were at least nominally Muslim. There is also no question that many Muslins, including more than a few American Muslims find the barbaric message from ISIS (I prefer the term Daesh) to be an attractive one. But Mr. Trump's Jersey City libel perpetuates the myth that all or most Muslims are cheering them on. There are a number of reputable fact checking web sites. Snopes may be the best known. They researched the Trump claim. There were rumors of Muslims cheering at the time and some documentation of cheers in the Middle East, but none in Jersey City. It is sheer confabulation and it ought to be quashed.