The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [16]
In the late 1990s police and reporters treated all variety of highway mishaps as road rage. One evening in 1998 the lead image on local news shows in Los Angeles was a car that had been sliced in half by a truck on a freeway. The fatal accident had been caused by the driver going up an exit ramp in the wrong direction, but reporters and highway patrol officers labeled it “another case of road rage.” Their justification? Witnesses reported the driver had been tailgating a van just moments earlier. At the time she drove up the exit ramp and into oncoming traffic she was neither a perpetrator nor victim of road rage, but because she may have acted aggressively in the recent past the incident could be counted as road rage.7
A few days after that incident, when an off-duty prison guard was shot dead on a freeway ramp, police and reporters described the event as “a random act of violence, like other examples of so-called road rage violence plaguing the nation’s motorists” (Los Angeles Times). This time too the characterization was unfounded. The victim’s husband, who had been driving the car, let police know immediately after the event that it was neither random nor an instance of road rage. According to his account, their assailants had followed them from a shopping mall, forced them to pull off the road, and stolen money. It was when his wife pulled out her state corrections officer badge, the husband reported, that they shot her. Police later suspected the husband himself in the murder, but never was road rage a likely hypothesis.8
Bad People Substitute for Bad Policies
Stories about road rage left little doubt as to what, or rather who, was responsible—vicious strangers. Over the past decade or so police and reporters had warned of disparate new categories of creeps out to get us—home invasion robbers, carjackers, child nabbers, deranged postal workers. Now they were issuing an even broader warning. Everywhere we go are “strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move,” the announcer on “20/20” cautioned. Indeed, Tom Jarriel went on to suggest, “the most disturbing aspect of the growing trend toward roadway violence is that we can’t choose who we drive with on the highways.“9
In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals. Demented drivers rather than insane public policies occupied center stage in the coverage of road rage. Where reference was made at all to serious problems that drivers face, these were promptly shoved behind a curtain of talk about violent motorists. “Roads are more crowded all the time, which means more delays and more frustration,” National Public Radio’s Alex Chadwick reported, but rather than pursue the point with insights from, say, experts on mass transit, he quotes someone from the AAA who contends that driving “frees the beast” in people.10
In USA Today reporter Patrick O’Driscoll notes that 70 percent of urban freeways are clogged at rush hour (up 15 percent over the past fifteen years) and that traffic exceeds road capacity in most U.S. cities. Did he then go on to consider possibilities for relieving the congestion? On the contrary, his next sentence began, “Faced with tempers boiling over like radiators in rush-hour gridlock, police agencies are seeking ways to brand aggressive driving as socially unacceptable . . .”11
Rather than traffic experts journalists spotlighted police officials, who understandably took the opportunity to urge the hiring of more officers. Or reporters turned to so-called experts such as Arnold Nerenberg, a psychologist who dubs himself “America’s road-rage therapist” and runs a web site (www.roadrage.com) where he brags that he has been featured in dozens of TV programs and magazines. Not a researcher, Nerenberg