The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [91]
Some of the coverage of MCS was generated by alliances between activists and businesses trying to make a buck off the metaphorical ailment. When Debra Lynn Dadd, an MCS activist, published a book of recommendations on how to stay clear of dangerous household products, the maker of Bon Ami, a “chemical free” cleanser, contacted her. They sent Dadd on a media tour in which she promoted her booklet as well as Bon Ami. Dadd’s and Bon Ami’s efforts were reported on favorably, in turn, in Sierra, a publication of the environmental organization. 27
Taking victims’ accounts almost at face value, few of the feature stories I located about MCS bothered to mention the many medical studies documenting that people said to have MCS actually suffer from common conditions such as eczema, asthma, and depression, and that some are merely possessed of an unusually sensitive sense of smell. Articles that did take note of medical knowledge about MCS often treated medical scientists as just another group with an opinion or perspective. “It’s an allergy-like condition generally regarded by the mainstream medical establishment with skepticism, though more people are reporting MCS symptoms all the time,” wrote a Washington Post reporter in an article in 1994 about a ban on perfumes and colognes at the University of Minnesota.28
Journalists were not alone in downplaying evidence from medical science in favor of anecdotes from MCS sufferers. Some of my colleagues in the social sciences adopted the same position. People such as Magidson and Bell are harbingers of “society’s next national health problem,” predicted Steve Kroll-Smith and Anthony Ladd in the academic journal Sociological Spectrum. The reports of MCS sufferers should be taken very seriously, these sociologists argued, irrespective of the conclusions of medical authorities.29
And why should we embrace the reports of the metaphorically ill? Because, as Linda and Bill Bovie, advocates for both MCS and Gulf War Syndrome, put it in an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “The accounts these individuals give of how their illnesses developed all seem to have a remarkable consistency. Most of them sound as though they were perfectly normal, average people who had never given a thought to the possibility of chemicals jeopardizing their health before becoming acutely ill from a close encounter with some toxic substance.”30
Much the same can be said, of course, about many religious fundamentalists and smokers’ rights enthusiasts—or, for that matter, people who claim they were abducted by space aliens. They are usually sincere and ordinary folks, and their accounts often have a great deal of consistency. Yet when have fundamentalist Christians been taken seriously by journalists or sociologists in their contention that AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality, or anecdotes from smokers’ rights groups about chain-smoking octogenarians accepted over scientific evidence about tobacco and lung cancer?
Parallel reports from large numbers of ordinary people do not necessarily add up to truth. People often tell similar stories that are not accurate depictions of reality, as any anthropologist or police officer can testify. Like novelists and playwrights, regular folks adopt common images, plot lines, and themes—elements of what literary critics call intertextuality—in telling stories about themselves. “We need not assume that patients are either describing an organic disorder or else lying when they present similar narratives of symptoms,” notes Elaine Showalter. “Instead, patients learn about diseases from the media, unconsciously develop the symptoms, and then attract media attention in an endless cycle.”31
What keeps the cycle going—what tantalizes journalists, academics, and others about stories from the metaphorically ill and distinguishes them from others with improbable theories—is the critiques they afford of major social institutions. We have begun to see that each metaphoric illness serves as evidence of deficiencies in a particular institution: Gulf