First, a declaration of an uncomfortable fact:
When I first read the question, I thought of the port of
Aqaba, captured by T.E. Lawrence during World War I. I certainly didn't know Agrabah was the fictional city in
Aladdin.
Agrabah, Aqaba,
Arrakis, Ankara. I think it's pretty easy to come up with a sound-alike for a Middle Eastern city. That it comes from a Disney movie is just icing on the cake. To be fair, in some ways this is a trickier question in the sense that most people probably don't anticipate being asked a trick question by a pollster. It's like asking "Which of the 51 states has the highest crime rate?"
So back to my own reaction, FEAR: I DON'T KNOW WHERE AGRABAH IS! You can certainly extrapolate that fear into:
- This is a real city, otherwise the pollster wouldn't be asking me.
- I don't want to appear stupid.
- I'm for a muscular Middle East policy, therefore I'll answer yes.
...and I would guess that was the thought process at least some of the 'yes' respondents went through.
And I would agree that it's disturbing that some people are so cavalier about the decision to bomb, they will bomb a city that doesn't exist. Their own ignorance was not an impediment in the decision to bomb. (In California, if you asked people if they wanted to bomb Antioch, they'd probably be aghast.)
Sometimes it's not how much you know, it's how much you acknowledge what you don't know.
A few posts back, I wrote about the rise of the '
Limbic Americans'. In evolutionary terms, the limbic system is post-reptilian and early mammalian.
From
Mcgill:
The limbic brain emerged in the first mammals. It can record memories of behaviours that produced agreeable and disagreeable experiences, so it is responsible for what are called emotions in human beings. The main structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The limbic brain is the seat of the value judgments that we make, often unconsciously, that exert such a strong influence on our behaviour.
...and the decision to bomb without knowing where you're bombing is exactly the kind of limbic response I was talking about. It's just passing that impulse up to the neocortex, but this decision isn't being made with our higher brain functions.
