From the issue dated October 26, 2001
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The Fate of False FearsBy BARRY GLASSNERIn the couple of weeks following the far-too-real horrors of September 11,
These dangers were minuscule to begin with, and there was no credible evidence that they were increasing. But the casual media consumer could be excused for imagining otherwise, given the hundreds of gory stories about shark-bitten children and the characterization of Washington as an "anonymous entrapment zone" in which hapless young college women are "bowled over by a power differential that is hard to resist," as Andrew Sullivan described the city in a New York Times article. All manner of hyperbolized hazards disappeared from the news media in the wake of the terrorist attacks -- at least for a while. No longer did an accident at an amusement park get treated as major news and evidence of a frightening trend. Nor did the latest incidents of violence at schools make headlines and provoke pundits to decry the sorry state of America's youth. Was it the magnitude of the terrorist attacks that vanquished garden-variety scare stories from the news media? Partly. To be sure, the loss of thousands of lives and the threat of more terrorism utterly overshadowed any story of Jaws or Gary Condit. Even producers at local TV-news programs and Rivera Live could not fail to understand that for some time, stories about bioterrorism, airport security, and hate crimes against Arab-Americans would hold more interest and importance for viewers than the usual fare. There is another reason that some of the old scare stories have not occupied the news media of late. A powerful and pernicious narrative of the past few decades has largely lost its usefulness for fearmongers in the news industry and for the politicians and pundits they quote. Call it the sick-society narrative. In that narrative, the villains are domestic, heroes are hard to find, and the story line is about the decline of American civilization. That narrative is incompatible with another that came to the fore after the terrorist attacks. The new narrative is about national unity, villains from foreign lands, and the greatness of American society. While social historians will note that narratives of national degeneracy and superiority have traded ascendancy before in the United States, one result of the current shift is the putative dangerousness of certain categories of people and behaviors. Consider a pair of so-called rages that have been the object of thousands of news reports over the past half-dozen years. Dubbed "epidemics" by journalists, politicians, and the occasional academic, "workplace rage" and "road rage" are anything but widespread. An American worker's odds of being killed by a colleague are roughly one in two million. Only about one in ten workplace homicides is committed by a co-worker, and the rate has remained stable for a decade. Likewise, and contrary to news reports that "road-rage violence is plaguing the nation's motorists," (Los Angeles Times) who are beset by "strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move" (20/20), data from an AAA study suggest that less than 1 percent of automobile injuries are the result of road rage. The percentage is even lower -- about one in a thousand -- for highway fatalities. Alarmist claims about "rages" have relied not on hard data, but on poignant anecdotes and a sick-society narrative that amplifies their significance. That narrative tells of unhealthy levels of stress in the United States and what Stephen L. Carter described in his book Civility as "the disintegration of social life." According to Carter and other pundits, Americans have been suffering a "civility crisis" and behaving badly. Instances of aggressive behavior in public are proof of the crisis. The narrative that has, in recent weeks, supplanted that one heralds a new spirit of cooperation and congeniality in American public life. According to a September 19 article in USA Today, "strangers are talking on city buses, shoppers are more polite in grocery checkout lines, and road rage seems to have eased on highways." The news media ran few stories about road rage in the weeks following September 11, and several that supported the notion that Americans have regained their civility. Another case in point: the September 27 "Dr. Gridlock" column in The Washington Post (a "Dear Abby"-style feature about transportation) began with a letter from a 77-year-old woman. "For the last two weeks, since the awful tragedy, I have noticed a lack of road rage and rudeness among drivers," she wrote. "I am accustomed to seeing tailgating, passing on the shoulder and nasty finger exhibitions. Even though I have been in areas of heavy traffic congestion, none of this has occurred." In his response to the letter, Dr. Gridlock (Ron Shaffer) reported that he is "hearing this from others also." In point of fact, while the manners of Americans may have altered somewhat after the terrorist attacks, it is primarily a change in focus by reporters and editors that has brought about the new portrait of a kinder and gentler America. A week before the attacks, anyone who set out to find well-behaved patrons at their local grocery stores would have succeeded. Similarly, in midand late September it was not difficult to uncover instances of hostile driving on the nation's roadways. The recent demise of the sick-society narrative augurs especially well for one sector of the U.S. population. Young American males in their late teens and 20s have been portrayed in the media over the past month as heroes in New York City and the military and as peaceniks on college campuses -- a striking departure from how this generation had been characterized over the past half-dozen years. In headlines in 1996, both Time and U.S. News & World Report described them as "Teenage Time Bombs." That same year, another Time headline spoke of "Children Without Souls," and in their book, Body Count, William J. Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, John J. DiIulio Jr., the future head of President George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and John P. Walters, Bush's nominee to become drug czar, issued an ominous prediction. "America's beleaguered cities are about to be victimized," they wrote, "by a paradigm-shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call 'the superpredators."' In reality, the rate of violent crimes committed by adolescents had been in decline since 1993 and would continue downward in the years to come. According to FBI reports, in 1999 homicide rates by youth stood at their lowest level since 1966. But politicians, pundits, and journalists were telling a different tale. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around or our country is going to be living in chaos," Bill Clinton asserted in 1997, even while acknowledging that the youth-violent-crime rate had fallen 9.2 percent the previous year. With rates of violence by urban youth in steep decline, school shootings in rural and suburban communities provided much of the evidence for what Geraldo Rivera called "an epidemic of seemingly depraved adolescent murderers." Scant attention was paid in the news media to the fact that multiple homicides in schools were nothing new (there were several in the 1970s and '80s). Nor did the news media make much of the steady decline in the number of violent deaths at schools since the 1992-93 academic year, when 55 students died. Even in 1998-99, when the horrific shootings at Columbine High School occurred, the total was 30 deaths out of 52 million students, a 45-percent decrease since 1992. Mike Males, a sociology instructor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has pointed out that if the murder rate in the United States as a whole were as low as that at its high schools, America would have one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. Survey data suggest, in fact, that for a range of crimes, from threats and assaults to robbery, today's high-school students experience about the same rates of violent crime as did their parents' generation in the 1970s. Yet in the four years since a student in Mississippi and another in Kentucky went on shooting sprees at their schools, there has been a great deal of talk about which societal forces conspired to make today's youth "the most damaged and disturbed generation the country has ever produced," as Randall Sullivan, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, described them in an article in 1998. In numerous news stories, the current generation of American youth was cited both as proof of, and as products of, a sick society. "Children without souls" who shoot up their schools manifest the pathological state of American society, the story went, even as a pathological society was said to cause their barbarity. Plainly, that story doesn't fit the recent celebration of American society and its citizenry, and the calls upon young Americans to make wartime sacrifices. Nor do some of the presumed pathogens in the stories about youth violence fit into the new narrative. In the wake of the school shootings, products of popular American culture such as Marilyn Manson recordings, computer games, and action films were routinely cited as causes. More recently, in stories about America's war on terrorism, those products have occupied quite a different place. "And now we are battling a bunch of atavistic ascetics who hate TV, music, movies, the Internet (except when they're planning atrocities), women and Jews," Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times column of October 3, echoing a sentiment being expressed frequently on radio and television as well. All of a sudden, American popular culture is referenced not as an infectious agent that turns kids into killers, but as a feature of our society that is wrongly reviled by our enemy. The new narrative has not obviated all needless fearmongering, however. On the contrary, it has elevated to newsworthiness some unsettling occurrences -- minor airline mishaps, phony bomb threats -- that previously would not have made headlines, and it has created an exaggerated sense of individual risk. Even were terrorist acts in the United States to increase significantly, the risk to an average citizen of serious injury or death would be less than from everyday dangers such as accidents and hypertension. Paradoxically, when fearful people buy guns, drive instead of fly, or isolate themselves in their homes, their risk from those more-prosaic dangers increases. Nor does the new narrative prevent producers of local TV-news programs from returning to some of their stock scare stories. Within three weeks of the terrorist attacks, a local TV-news program in Los Angeles began with a report about coyote attacks at a suburban elementary school. Another ran a story about accidents at amusement parks, a scare that had been a staple in print and on the airwaves over the summer of 2001 even though the danger of injury during a visit to an amusement park was probably no greater than during the drive to get there. If scares about coyotes and roller coasters have not disappeared, in part that is because they neither rely on a larger narrative about domestic infirmity nor conflict with stories of America's greatness. Unfortunately, at a time when Americans have new and real dangers to worry about, only some overblown risks have been deflated. Barry Glassner is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and author of The Culture of Fear (Basic Books, 1999). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B16
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education