The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [86]
Once the roofie scare began to die down media attention shifted to gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), promptly dubbed the “new” date-rape drug. Used for almost two decades by partygoers for a high and by bodybuilders as an alternative to steroids, GHB suddenly got depicted as “the Mickey Finn of the ’90s” (Chicago Sun-Times), more dangerous than roofies.51
And so the cycle continued.
7
METAPHORIC ILLNESSES
How Not to Criticize the Establishment
In an essay on cancer and another on AIDS Susan Sontag documented the perils of thinking metaphorically about illnesses. Imagining viruses as invading armies instead of microscopic matter, or scientists as warriors instead of researchers, does little good and can cause considerable harm, Sontag urged. “My purpose was, above all, practical,” she has said of her book, Illness as Metaphor. “For it was my doleful observation, repeated again and again, that the metaphoric trappings that deform the experience of having cancer have very real consequences: they inhibit people from seeking treatment early enough, or from making a greater effort to get competent treatment.” Sontag cited as examples people who waive chemotherapy in favor of quackery that promises to change so-called cancer-causing personality traits. 1
Continuing the line of argument I have been advancing, I propose a corollary to Sontag’s observations. Not only do we use metaphors to help us understand fatal illnesses that most of us are poorly equipped to comprehend scientifically, we also create certain illnesses, what I call “metaphoric illnesses,” to help us come to terms with features of our society that we are unprepared to confront directly. Historically, the most famous such illness was neurasthenia. Diagnosed in the United States mostly during the nineteenth century and disproportionately in women, the symptoms of neurasthenia were said to include extreme fatigue, muscle aches, mental confusion, chills, and fever. Like the people diagnosed with the ailments examined in this chapter, neurasthenics were not, by and large, hypochondriacs. They were verifiably sick, sometimes seriously so.2
But what caused their symptoms? Later research suggests a variety of familiar causes ranging from viruses to food poisoning to bad marriages. Back in 1881, however, George Beard, the physician known as the “father of neurasthenia,” attributed the illness to modern technology and the education of women. Then as now, people believed in metaphoric illnesses partly owing to graphic stories about ordinary women and men being struck down, and partly because the illnesses helped them justify fears, prejudices, and political ideologies they held. The disease of neurasthenia provided living, breathing proof that newly developed technologies and women’s emancipation truly were pernicious. Similarly, metaphoric illnesses of the 1990s such as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), multiple chemical sensitivity, and breast implant disorders have served to confirm present-day doubts.3
Battle Fatigue
Americans have yet to engage in a serious or sustained public discussion of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which was an unprecedented event in world history, a “deceptive war,” as the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard put it, in which “the enemy only appear[ed] as a computerized target,” never face to face. Depicted by the U.S. military and media as a swift, clean, nearly bloodless war won by “surgical air strikes” of buildings and munitions, in fact it was a brutally lopsided affair. One hundred forty-six Americans died, while allied troops killed upward of 100,000 Iraqis, many during the ground war inside Kuwait, but including about 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and 2,500 civilians who died directly from less-than-precise bombing operations. After the