Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yesterday morning, my mother had the television in the kitchen tuned to one of those conservative cable news channels -- CNN or Fox or something -- and they were going on and on and on about this white van left unattended near Times Square for a few days, and the police response to it, and all the speculation from folks nearby ... And everything about their tone of voice -- and even the camerawork and visual editing -- screamed, "You're supposed to be scared now, this is high drama, you know it's a bomb, don't you?"

I told my mother, "This should be one paragraph on page six, until they find out it's really something nefarious -- then it can be News." Once upon a time, unless my memory is even more rose-tinted than I think it is, television newscasters seemed to try to be reassuring, with an Everything Is Under Control delivery even when telling us that there were concerns and unknowns. Now they peddle fear.

After nearly an hour of this (I didn't see when it started, so it may have been longer), they finally spoke to somebody who seemed to know something about NYPD pre-big-public-event preparation, who said, in different words, that this was exactly when we'd expect to stumble across this sort of thing whether it was innocent or evil, and that although the police had to treat each suspicious package / vehicle / etc. with caution Just In Case, this was all really routine and probably no big deal, especially since we could see police officers without bomb-squad armour walking near the van. By then we'd had an hour of OMGTERRORISTSINNYFORNYE, and the "y'know, it's probably nothing" voice was downplayed. At that point my mother got tired of my ranting about the coverage and switched to a game show, so I don't know where it went, tone-wise, from there.

A few days ago, in resonse to all the chatter about the Underpants GnomeWould-Be-Bomber, someone pointed out that 9/11 took months of planning, lots of resources, and careful coordination between multiple teams ... and now, because of what we've done to ourselves since then in damage to the National Psyche, all they have to do is send one expendable patsy with $60 worth of explosives, and he doesn't even need to come close to actually making anything go boom to get us to wet our pants and do several orders of magnitute more damage to our economy than the $60 the chemicals cost.

Bruce Schneier revisited the topic of "security theatre" recently, pointing out that, "Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer." Then after going into the things that do make us really safer, he came back to the feeling-of-safety bit with this crucial paragraph [emphasis added by me]:

[...] we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it's how we collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It's not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

The pre-9/11 mindset was a mix of "we're invulnerable because we're the U S freakin' A", "terrorism is something that happens Other Places", and, "we're a free country, proud of our freedoms, and unafraid of freedom". The post-9/11 mindset seems to be "we want you to be too afraid to worry about being free, with your civil rights at the mercy of The Authorities and your spirit in thrall to those who sell you more fear because they can attach advertisements to it". We're about eight years overdue for a post-post-9/11 mindset, people, one where we say, "Hey, we're not invulnerable after all, and that sucks, but we're still Americans, and we're not going to let the Irish, the Brits, the Israelies, and everyone else whose society has soldiered on in the face of more frequent terrorist attacks than we'll ever see, make us look like suckers in comparison to them -- if 'the terrorists' 'hate us for our freedoms', let's give 'em reason to hate us, by waving our freedom in their faces instead of acting scared of high-theatre-low-probability events."

Before my mother said we should switch to a game show to get me off of complaining about the newscasters, I wondered aloud whether they ever stop to consider the harm they do by playing up every threat as loud as it'll go, and telling us we should be more afraid. Mom pointed out that with multiple 24-hour news channels, there's a big "news hole" (not her words) to fill, and they have to talk about something -- but to me that sounds like a fair explanation of motivation but a piss-poor excuse for sucking the courage out of our country ... and my complaint isn't just with the reporters and editors, but also with too many of our politicians, willing to peddle fear to buy votes.

Those reporters and anchors were already planning to talk about something before the too-long-unattended van was spotted, right? If they hadn't heard about a white van within camera range, they would have filled the news hole with something else. And I'm not even saying that they shouldn't have mentioned the van, just that it should've been an in-the-background thing: "NY police are checking out an unattended can parked suspiciously close to the planned festivities in Times Square, and some folks in the area are being inconvenienced in the process, but things like this are expected as they prepare an area for a large event -- we'll keep you posted if there turns out to be anything else to report later. Meanwhile, in Iran ..."

So yeah, we can understand why they'd play up any little thing they can squeeze drama -- and thus advertising dollars -- out of, but does that mean we should let them off the hook for succumbing to that temptation? (Okay, there is a problem here built into the system, admittedly: we're not their clients, we're their product; they don't answer to us, but to their stockholders and their advertisers, and those two groups want then to do things like this to us. But shouldn't we cattle revolt? Or at least complain and -- importantly -- go watch something else instead of rewarding this behaviour¹?)

A terrorist us someone who creates and spreads fear intentionally, to acheive some political aim, right? Is someone who peddles fear to sell advertising really any better just because they don't blow things up themselves? After all, these days terrorists don't have to blow anything up, as noted above -- they only need to remind us that somebody maybe could blow something up². Why is it Just Good Capitalism to spread fear from a television studio when it's Evil Terrorism to spread fear by doing something in the street or on an aeroplane to draw the mobile cameras to you? Why do we reward politicians to tell us to be ever more fearful, and then use that fear as an excuse to make us less American?

Post-post-9/11 time, folks! Stop playing along. Demand that our politicians and our media act like leaders and journalists instead of carnies and snake-oil peddlers, and deny the schmucks an audience.

Or get used to being yanked around by your adrenal gland until you can't tell which way is up and what freedom and self-respect are any more.

[1] Hey, if it'd been up to me in the first place, the television would've been off, or a VCR would've been hooked up to play the Charlie Rose show from the night before. And at home I don't even have cable, so I'm not rewarding this by paying a cable bill either.

[2] This is an example of (the dark side of) Feld's Ratio of Political Power, and I was ever so tempted to make a snarky comparison to another (unrelated) example, but feared it'd be to large a distraction to be worth the snark value.