I saw something interesting on the podcast of last night’s German news telecast Tagesthemen that as far as I can tell hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream media. As of this writing, even the Drudge Report hasn’t posted anything about it.
On Saturday night, March 13, a privately-owned TV station in the former Soviet republic of Georgia aired a “simulation” of a Russian invasion of that country. The telecast included footage of the actual invasion of Georgia’s South Ossetia province in August 2008. There were reports of the Russian troops heading towards the capital of Tblisi, the assassination of Georgian President Saakashvili, and opposition leaders siding with the Russians.
The whole thing was a hoax, reminiscent of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater of the Air on October 30, 1938. And just like its predecessor more than 70 years earlier, most people missed the beginning of the program, thought the events were real, and panicked. Here’s a link to a UK Guardian article about this incident.
I had my own experience with people panicking over something I wrote almost three years ago. After posting a parody of some of the left-wing trolls that used to comment on this blog, I paraphrased Orson Welles’s epilogue to his War of the Worlds broadcast in the comments section. One of things Welles said was this: “We annihilated the world before your very eyes, and utterly destroyed the CBS.” (CBS was the radio network that carried the broadcast of The War of the Worlds). I changed CBS to the place of employment of most (if not all) of the trolls I was satirizing.
Well, you’d have thought I’d declared World War III. So great was the feigned outrage by the trolls that I had to change it to “…and utterly destroyed the Ivory Dome.” (In retrospect, that change was more in line with the original comment by Orson Welles.) But for the almost three years (most recently on March 2nd of this year), one of the trolls has been using my original comment as a pretext for claiming that I’m some kind of mad bomber, hell-bent on destroying one of the great landmarks of Amarillo.
It’s been exactly 1,004 days since I allegedly threatened to blow up the American Quarter Horse Association. Last I checked, it’s still intact.
