The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [128]
When it comes to sustaining fear, one scare supports another. The administration and Homeland Security rolled out alerts, warnings, and predictions of various types of attacks steadily throughout the decade. Some were laughable from the start, as when the government advised citizens in late 2001 to stockpile duct tape and rolls of plastic in order to seal their homes against chemical weapon attacks—despite the fact that experts knew these measures were probably pointless (when chemical agents are released outdoors, they are almost immediately diluted by the wind). Since the risk of dying in a chemical weapon attack is far less than a million to one, a person is more likely to die in a car accident en route to purchase the duct tape, as one clear-eyed journalist noted in the New York Times. Paradoxically, when fearful people buy guns, drive instead of fly, or isolate themselves in their homes, their risk from these more prosaic dangers increases.55
The DHS hyped as well the threat of bioterrorism, warning of the intentional release of anthrax or smallpox, though the only actual incident, the anthrax attack mentioned earlier, killed only five people. The danger of a smallpox epidemic was even more remote, as the disease is rarely fatal and must be spread from person to person. Any release of smallpox into a population would probably be limited in scope and quickly isolated by public health authorities. But armed with eerie images and chilling scenarios of poxed populations from the past, the administration’s mouthpieces got plenty of attention in the print and electronic media.56
Then there was the ominously named “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive spiked with radioactive isotopes that got depicted as a rogue-style nuclear weapon. The real damage by such a bomb would be in the explosion, not the radioactivity, some media eventually noted, albeit too late to prevent bad dreams by Americans who heard Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announcement on June 8, 2002, of “an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’” His remarks set off a fresh run on duct tape and plastic, and a number of federal agencies began stockpiling potassium iodide pills, which can protect against radiation. (The terrorist plot, it turned out, was no more than “some fairly loose talk,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz subsequently admitted.)57
By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again—that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” In May, just prior to the Democratic Convention, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete; immediately after the convention, the Department of Homeland Security issued yet another terrorist alert, which diverted America’s attention away from Kerry and back to the “wartime” president, George Bush.
The strategy worked. Bush won re-election in November 2004, and in the four years that followed the administration followed the lead of music groups who survive year after year by performing extended versions of their only hit song. The Bush administration kept droning on about 9/11, clear to their final days in Washington.
Among their latter-day ploys, used multiple times, was the purportedly leaked report. In 2005, for instance, the DHS issued a report, “National Planning Scenarios,” that they said was never intended for public view—thereby making it seem particularly portentous. Somehow it got posted on a Hawaii state government website and picked up by