Scandalous Scare Tactics

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by Rex Roberts

A sociology professor believes people have nothing to fear but fearmongering itself.

The headlines are unsettling, even if common sense suggests they are nothing but old-fashioned hyperbole. "CYBERPORN," shouts Time magazine, announcing its cover story revealing "how pervasive and wild it really is" Television is worse. If it's not Geraldo Rivera warning parents, "They will come for your kid over the Internet .... They will come in a pickup in the dark of night" then it's Peter Jennings deploring heroin use by teens, "almost impossible to exaggerate ... a cautionary tale for all parents and all children."

As Barry Glassner demonstrates page after page in The Culture of Fear (Basic Books, 320 pp), Americans are bombarded by scare stories of all varieties, as well as saturation coverage of teen-agers executing their classmates, police brutalizing `innocent citizens and nannies pummeling their charges. Statistically speaking, Americans are safer than ever-- crime is down, the economy is up -- yet the media, not to mention opportunistic politicians and class-action lawyers, insist that danger lurks on every street (car-jackings! road rage!), even in our own living rooms (MCS, or multiple chemical sensitivity, still another acronym passing as an ailment).

Glassner's underlying premise -"that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities" -- is itself a kind of paranoia, presupposing a coven of elite powerbrokers who manipulate the rest of us with their insidious marketing machinery greased by an army of media minions. The fact is (as the previous sentence demonstrates), it's easy to create straw men. While Glassner debunks seriously overhyped dangers-rogue flesh-eating bacteria, incompetent airplane mechanics, fascist politically correct feminists -- he inflates his own bugbears and hobgoblins, most of which would find a spot on any liberal's Top 10 list of Most Frightening Phantoms.

Glassner hates guns, for example -for him, the source of so much that is wrong with the United States. "TV shows do not kill or maim people" writes Glassner. "Guns do. It is the unregulated possession of guns, more than any other factor, that accounts for the disparity in fatality rates from violent crime in the United States compared to most of the world."

Yet Glassner spends pages discussing what may have been the most horrific massacre of all -- the shooting of 16 schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, by Thomas Hamilton -- in part to debunk "age-old prejudices linking homosexuality and pedophilia" but also to argue that even stringent gun controls in Great Britain were not good enough. Reasonable people could draw the opposite conclusion from that terrible event: that gun control alone cannot stop senseless slaughter-- and that gun-control advocates such as Glassner have a radical agenda reflecting their own culture of fear.

Glassner likewise expends a great deal of rhetoric condemning white supremacists and fundamental Christians who promote racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. "Nationwide, 20 to 30 percent of students from racial and ethnic minority groups report being physically or verbally attacked during their college careers, according to surveys" writes Glassner who, when not refuting dubious statistics, uses them to sound his own alarms. "For every anti-Semitic African American enrolled in America's colleges and universities there are dozens, if not hundreds, of white anti-Semites, racists and homophobes."

New York Times columnist Frank Rich covered similar ground in a July column celebrating "the tidal wave of gayness, promulgated by homo- and heterosexuals alike" that has swelled since the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student beaten to death last fall. Rich managed to work in at least four digs at the religious right in that column -- and no doubt some outspoken members of that group have invited such rebuke. But name-calling and finger-pointing won't help people to understand each other, and if fundamentalists "succumb to fear and ignorance" as Rich and Glassner maintain, certain liberals are equally quick to stereotype practicing Christians as mean-spirited and vindictive, if not outright evil. Both attitudes are products of unjustified fears.

Glassner also lambastes exploitative corporations that destroy families by downsizing the workforce, as well as short-sighted politicians who fail to enact universal health care or work for social justice. "One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors" writes Glassner. "Poverty, for example, correlates strongly with child abuse, crime, and drug abuse"

Point well taken. Too predictably, however, Glassner translates economic inequality into rising murder and suicide rates-- frustrated men seeking revenge or escape by pulling the trigger. Undoubtedly there will be further incidents like the Independence Day shootings by Benjamin Smith, the personification of rage-driven racism. But just as Glassner scolds the media for turning all young black males into potential predators, so too we must resist the notion that the country is littered by angry white militiamen plotting to kill Jews and blacks. One culture of fear is not better than another.