The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [115]
Nor do some of the supposed causes of youth violence fit into the new narrative. Consider, for example, the public discussion of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999, a gruesome incident that occurred between the time I sent the manuscript of this book to the publisher and when it arrived in book-stores. In the national response to Columbine, there was misdirection away from real trends and dangers that confront children and adolescents, like the fact that millions do not have health insurance, are malnourished, and attend deteriorating schools. There was misdirection as well away from the most proximate and verifiable factor in the deaths at Columbine and elsewhere—namely, the ready availability of guns to people who shouldn’t have access to them. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association the same year as the Columbine shootings documented that, even though the number of youth homicides had been declining, guns were responsible for an increasing proportion of the killings. 1
Yet instead of a clear, focused discussion on keeping guns out of kids’ hands, in the wake of Columbine, the public was treated to scares about all sorts of peripheral things like the Internet, video games, movies, rap music, trench coats, and Marilyn Manson (who observed in Rolling Stone: “I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on, so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly”).2
But post-9/11, it was no longer fashionable to disparage our popular culture. In stories about America’s war on terrorism, the culture was 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. “We are battling a bunch of atavistic ascetics who hate TV, music, movies, the Internet (except when they’re planning atrocities), women, and Jews,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it.3
Plane Wrecks and Road Rage
In the second half of this chapter, I’ll explore in some detail how responses to the attacks of 9/11 played out in—and further precipitated—the culture of fear. But first, let’s return to questionable scares I investigated from the 1990s that still live on. Given their shadiness, one might have expected them to vanish in an age of terror and economic turmoil, yet they persistently reappeared.
About the only dubious dangers that faded out for long periods of time were those for which fear mongers could find no incidents whatever from which to project a trend. In 2007 and 2008, for instance, there was hardly any talk about the topic of chapter 8 since not a single passenger died in an airline crash of a U.S. carrier during those two years.
It took but one fatal crash, however, for the hysteria to start up again. After a commuter plane went down in February 2009, the New York Times began its online story—“50 Killed as Plane Hits House Near Buffalo” —with a sentence that managed at once to suggest a trend of airline disasters in the region, and connect the incident to the planes that flew into the World Trade Center seven and a half years earlier. “All the people aboard the Continental flight, including the widow of a 9/11 victim and one person in the house, were killed on Thursday, officials said, in the second major crash in a month in New York State,” the article began, even though no lives were lost in the previous crash. In the print edition two days after the crash, the Times devoted much of the front page to photos and profiles of victims, and two full inside pages of the first section to the accident.4
Other reporters magnified the Continental crash by quoting doomsayers who claimed that airlines had become lax about safety, and by digging deep in their files for alarming accounts and frightening photos of planes that had veered off runways or had engine trouble over the previous several