To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books June 21, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/06/21/fear Fighting fear with fear In "The Culture of Fear," Barry Glassner says we scare too easily. But does he have to be so scary about it? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Chris Colin There's a "Three's Company" episode in which Jack and Janet, two of the sitcom's stars, get robbed by a man in a ski mask. The town police chief assigns a cop to their apartment for protection -- the robber, he knows, is a maniac and will probably return to kill Jack and Janet. But when the cop arrives at the apartment, Jack recognizes the tattoo on his hand as that of the robber. With some help from Mr. Furley, their perpetually frightened landlord, Jack and Janet manage to knock the apparent impostor unconscious with a flower vase. But moments later, after they have succeeded in roping up the villain, the real robber enters the apartment wielding a gun. In their attempt to get to the bottom of things, Jack and Janet's hypertrophied sense of suspicion led them to thrash the wrong man. 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. His perpetual astonishment here betrays a coarse understanding of the mainstream press, and consequently of the occasionally complex messages it imparts. In his critique of recent road-rage coverage, for example, Glassner exposes the media in all its breathless fuss: "They're all around you, everywhere you drive, waiting to explode," he quotes a "20/20" episode as saying about aggressive drivers. Quotes from other dramatic road-rage stories follow, from Oprah Winfrey to the Los Angeles Times. But Glassner misses an interesting nuance in the story's development. What began as an earnest and grave tone subtly gave way, over time, to something lighter. Road rage never became a joke for newscasters, but a we-know-we're-being-dramatic air did emerge in some of the reports. Where newscasters had issued frenzied warnings about drivers waiting to explode, they now toned their stories down to accommodate its clearly diminished scope. A suggestion of self-consciousness emanated from the new batch of stories, as though journalists had glimpsed themselves delivering precisely the kind of news people groan about. 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