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Other pasts, other places
The author of "Possession" recommends five unforgettable historical novels.
By A.S. Byatt
[06/21/99]

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"Love Is Where It Falls"
A gay actor recalls his 11-year "passionate friendship" with a straight woman 40 years his senior.
By Daniel Reitz
[06/21/99]

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"White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris"
A history defends the hunters as conservationists and argues that the real villains were poachers.
By Scott Sutherland
[06/18/99]

Ivory Tower
Professor Neurotoxicity
A renegade researcher believes the teenage killers of Columbine could have been driven to crime by environmental poisoning.
By Jill Priluck
[06/18/99]

Advice for real men
A writer's guidelines for being a "standup guy" look more like a primer on chickening out.
By Cary Tennis
[06/17/99]

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Thus unfolds the psychological architecture of Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear," a sweeping examination of irrational fear in the United States. Like the police officer's identity, truth emerges in the book as a furtive reality, overlooked by a paranoid, misled public. We're afraid of the wrong things, it seems, having been whipped into a blind frenzy by the perverse charm of global dread. The University of Southern California sociology professor takes a universe of national nightmares -- crime, drug use, disease, air safety, the Gulf War and other headline-grabbing phenomena -- and turns each on its sensational ear. Left undeconstructed, he argues, these fantasies divert our attention from the real robber just outside the door.

The book reads like an exploded Harper's Index: a rush of startling facts, a struggle to process them all. For example, Glassner shows how our fears around crime often have little to do with actual crime statistics. By the mid-1990s, "62 percent of us described ourselves as 'truly desperate' about crime -- almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher." Similarly he shows how the media's war on drugs has often meant a war on simple facts. In the late 1990s, the number of illegal-drug users in the U.S. had decreased by half compared to 10 years before; still, only one in six Americans believed that the country was making progress.

And if the real problems of crime and drugs have been hopelessly inflated, Glassner shows how certain national fears seem to be invented outright. As evidence he cites a 1985 ABC News/Washington Post poll that found 60 percent of parents fearing their kids would be injured or killed because of Halloween candy sabotage. When a University of Southern Illinois professor looked into the matter, he found that not a single death or serious injury existed on record. Two children had, in fact, died of poisoning in Halloween history, but the poison came from their own homes.

"The Culture of Fear" unfolds as a landscape of windmills and a portrait of the nation tilting at them. Fear itself, for Glassner, is not the problem. It is, rather, a dangerous pathology that sucks our attention and dollars from truly frightening problems: "hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population."

But this important argument flounders amid structural shortsightedness: Glassner neglects to see that he has participated in the very system of fear he hoped we would transcend. "We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us," he writes dramatically. When Glassner pulls back the curtain to reveal alarmist journalism, he does so with nearly the same alarm. As he correctly identifies, America's collective fear comes not just from misleading statistics, but from the neon and flare used to present them; any departure from this cycle, then, requires a different voice.

In part, this is because Glassner launches an offensive against the very source of his own rhetorical power. One of the interesting things this research shows us is just how many experts figure into our national consciousness. Behind every paranoid myth, an expert lurks with a survey and a bar graph. No matter how irrational the anxiety, the book illustrates, an authority always emerges, willing to endorse it. So Glassner's decision to fight fire with fire -- his principal strategy is to disarm one stat with another -- feels a little disappointing. Despite the satisfaction of seeing "Dateline" nailed, it's hard to see how this will elevate our dialogue on fear.

Most important, Glassner's examination unfurls too often with the same no duh as every "Three's Company" episode. His dirt on vapid rap-lyric critics yields nothing in the way of surprise, and his revelation that road rage is actually an overblown media fantasy reads a little like a predictable sitcom punchline. It's frustrating, because Glassner is clearly a talented researcher, but his research has unearthed facts too familiar to jump-start the paradigm shifts he argues for.

"No longer, we learned in Time, was it 'unusual for kids to get back at the world with ammunition,'" Glassner writes, lightly mocking the magazine's histrionics. But balking at Time's histrionics is like complaining that the beach is sandy. Of course mass-market newsmagazines sound hysterical -- theirs is a genre that has never purported to offer the thoroughness or calm of, say, Harper's. Glassner finds himself in one state of shock after another: If it isn't Time dramatizing its stories, it's Barbara Walters manipulating our feelings.

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