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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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The book's clumsiness with nuance borders on the offensive in a discussion of child molestation myths. Glassner surmises that, because certain children "changed their tunes" regarding their molestation claims, the alleged abuse probably never happened. Certainly not all accusers are victims, but Glassner must know that for children under emotional stress, disclosure of trauma sometimes involves a long and complex process of communication.

"The Culture of Fear" works best in its exploration of "metaphoric illness." Riffing off Susan Sontag's critique of metaphoric interpretations of disease (cancer patients who imagine viruses as "invading armies" rather than microscopic matter, for example, tend to seek less treatment than patients with more literal understandings), Glassner asserts that an inversion of this phenomenon can be just as dangerous.

"Not only do we use metaphors to help us understand fatal illnesses that most of us are poorly equipped to comprehend scientifically," he writes, "we also create certain illnesses ... to help us come to terms with features of our society that we are unprepared to confront directly."

Glassner argues that Gulf War syndrome assumed metaphorical status, allowing Americans to use it as a vehicle for criticizing defense policy. Even as evidence from prominent medical authorities suggested that GWS couldn't be explained by the original theories of chemical exposure, the news media remained irrationally convinced in many instances. "Whether or not there is a coverup," a bizarre 1996 Washington Post story read, "the case represents the Pentagon's self-protective culture at its worst."

As Glassner astutely points out, employing disease as a symbolic substitute for a direct -- and vital -- critique of Pentagon policy has real consequences. According to a study by Princeton professor Elaine Showalter, thousands of Gulf War vets eschewed invaluable psychological counseling in favor of countless medical exams -- "even when their stories make clear that anxiety, fear, and anger are among their symptoms."

With such interpretations -- unveiling a national mythology and then debunking it with well-researched figures --"The Culture of Fear" often makes good on its promise to explain "why Americans are afraid of the wrong things." Couched in logical, pop-psychology terms like symbolic substitution and metaphoric illness, our unreality suddenly appears as part of a knowable system. And as we recognize the patterns of our myths, Glassner aptly identifies the culprits responsible: "those who tap into our moral insecurities" in exchange for power and money.

Ultimately, however, the impressive breadth of Glassner's study exposes its frequent lack of depth. The book touches on all the right points -- from violence in schools to drug use to illness -- but often leaves them half-excavated. Remarking on America's feckless prison-building schemes (more prisons don't equal less serious crime), he writes, "In California we spend more on jails than on higher education." The important point languishes at the level of bumper-sticker reasoning, where greater scrutiny could have pushed the argument a little further. If this sort of oversight evinces anything, it's Glassner's misidentification of his audience: Anyone who would pick up a book debunking national myths already knows the inadequacy of mainstream journalism and has come looking for a richer critique.

In what begins as a look at gun fears in America, Glassner lets his analysis degenerate into a standard-fare gun-control argument. His assessments are accurate and deserved, but in the context, his agenda bars them from resonating. Glassner never claims to be unbiased, but he does purport to search for truth. And herein lies the most fascinating effect of the book: "The Culture of Fear" reads as a brilliant example of how the struggle for authority plays in America. Pitting expert against expert, myth against myth, it demonstrates precisely how truth gets wrested, continuously, from one set of hands to another. In the polemics of fear, Glassner wields an impressive body of research and consequently enjoys the power of redefining reality for a moment in history. But the struggle for this power, even when born out of all the right reasons, smacks of the very compulsion Glassner recognizes in our culture's fertile paranoia. And like the purveyors of fear he condemns, he does a better job cataloguing what's wrong in America than identifying solutions. And that's sort of scary.
salon.com | June 21, 1999

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