We are not a nation at war (though the current administration uses war an excuse for many of its criminal activities).
We are a Nation at Fear. Even when it isn't color coded for us, we know what level it is at. For the past two weeks, officially it has been at Infra-red, what they would call 11 in "Spinal Tap". I can tell you the exact moment it was ramped up. That came when the Bush Administration told the Blair Administration that it was time to arrest to Liquid Terra Suspects. Not a day had passed without some report of some suspicious passenger being singled out on an airplane or some suspicious substance raising red flags at some airport screening. The arrests are shouted to us in big headlines as breaking news with lots of fanfare. The retractions the next day are buried in the small print.
Time out. None of these suspicious people has been a terra-ist. None of the substances has posed a danger. The Liquid Terra guys had no passports, no tickets. Half of them have been released for lack of evidence that the police in Great Britain could not gather, because the Bush Administration thought that it was more important to scare Americans on cue than to infiltrate a real terrorist cell.
Fear isn't waging an all air assault. On the southern border states, it is trying to scare us with stories like this one,
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/15359034.htm "Revolving Door" about how the latest suspect in the dreadful border murders may be a man who has frequently crossed the border and at one point was a US felon on parole. The picture of the bald young man staring boldly into the camera does not invite us to feel sympathy for the plight of the working young women who no choice but to live and work in this area plagued by a serial killer while both the Mexican and US authorities ignored them. It is meant to inspire fear. We are supposed to fear that another kind of threat is moving north over land and only the GOP with their great big Neuvo-Berlin Wall can stop it.
Fear can find you even in your home. The news no longer gives us inspiring stories of underdogs who prevail through perseverance or ordinary people who survive hardship with their spirits intact. It no longer presents problems along with possible solutions. That is the news of the New Deal and the Great Society. That is the news of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather Instead, everything is marketed like "Scrooge" from the movie "Scrooged".
Frank Cross: "(T)he people already wanna watch the show. That isn't good enough!They have got to be so scared to miss it, so terrified!"
So everything is about the death of a member of the majority demographic. Better yet, the deaths of a bunch of members of the majority demographic at the same time, through brutal, unexpected violence often at the hands of a minority demographic that is poorly understood or feared. When a perfect son or daughter is killed, the members of the press are there like vultures, because they know that scared moms and dads will tune in to watch for advice on how they can ensure that their beloved children do not meet the same sad fate. Rather than alleviating the parents' fear, the journalists ramp it up to 11 just like Bush and Cheney do. They are pushers, and they want to get their audience hooked on their product. Create the fear, offer a little relief, then push up the fear again. Keep the scared suckers coming back for more and more. You have to have addicts if you are going to run 24 hour news networks.
Eventually the audience will figure out that the middle aged woman who runs the daycare center probably does not run a pedophilia and pornography ring (Fear Drug of Choice c. late 1980's to early 1990) and then the fear peddlers change their wares. Be wary of the Rita Cosbys of the world. To you and I they may look like figures of fun, but they do real harm to real people.
The news of fear does not present a health threat as something that can be addressed and remedied. Everything becomes apocalyltic. AIDS is front page as long as it is an incurable disease of young white men. When it is a treatable disease of Africans and African-americans, it is no longer "sexy". The news of fear is reactive, not pro-active. It protrays citizens as helpless victims of the world in which they live who are assailed by storms and corporate giants and dueling armies as if these three are all the same thing. When Israeli missiles rained down upon Lebanese people the coverage was no different from that which we will get when the next hurricane hits the Gulf. There was no talk of how to end the suffering, only a detailed record of the tragedy and a big "Aren't you glad you're not here?"