Letters to the Editor

• What, exactly, are we so afraid of?

  [Read the article: Manimal magnetism]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Laura Miller makes some interesting points about American viewers and their culture. But to answer the question, "What are we afraid of?" we need to ask what do Karl Rove and George Bush want us to be afraid of? We see how successful Rove et al have been at manipulating the American public through fear. But how do we account for the magnitude of that fear? It doesn't make sense that it came from 9/11 alone. No, it was that housewife in Wyoming expressing her fears in opinion polls who kept Rove cooking up new fears.

  Rove knows that a major theme in our culture is right under our noses, but we seldom examine it: our society, not having been attacked on our own soil, had illogically fostered a longing for thrills and fears. This was exacerbated by Hollywood summer chill movies that were designed to give goose-bumps to mostly teenaged audiences, and which promoted a distrust of mad scientists creating evil monsters or diseases that were let loose upon the world through their equally evil, destructive, and secret technologies, and all of this is now reflected in the attitudes of lots of people who don't read or analyze but do watch. (More on this may be found in the writings of Robert Brustein, especially in his essay, "Reflections on Horror Movies.")

  Watching the twin towers go down on TV on 9/11 was a lot like watching "Black Sunday," a 1977 Hollywood precursor of terrorist attacks from the air, or some other terrifying Hollywood movie such as "Independence Day," which Fox News just used as a backdrop for the "foiled" Los Angeles plot story Bush described yesterday. The difference was that 9/11 viewers knew it was real. It was their worst (and some would say their best) movie nightmare come true. What would make anyone say that this event was psychologically appealing to many in America? Before you stop reading right here, many film critics have made precisely this point: we were ALL Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," not Janet Leigh in the shower. This is a deep horror that we continue to deny. TV viewers watching 9/11 were seeing it from the eyes of the perpetrators (at least the eyes behind the cameras), not from the position of the victims. What became even more frightening was that Americans were not only terrified, they were guilty "participants" as well. This translates into fear, fear of the technology exploited by scientists and engineers (skyscrapers and airplanes--the first King Kong, remember?) and fear that we have sinned and must be forgiven. Karl Rove plays on this theme every chance he gets, and he has succeeded in splitting this country into 1) the religious, the fearful, the watchers, and 2) the doubters, the scientists, the readers, the critics. So, it isn't really Republicans versus Democrats; it's the fearful versus the skeptics.

  Now, when you hear of a mother of three kids on a ranch in Wyoming who is terrified of terrorist attacks out there in the boondocks, you know how illogical that is, but can you convince that woman? Probably not, because she is afraid of evil scientists, distrusts all science, and cannot comprehend modern technologies, which are more like magic to her. And she is afraid of her own unworthiness and culpability, too. Looking up at the stars at night, seeing infinity, makes her equally as frightened. She feels small and insignificant. She does not seek answers or explanations; she seeks shelter and protection. Bush is an anti-science president who speaks to a vast audience in the United States who irrationally fear science, and he makes a point of it, over and over again. He just did it in his State of the Union address: he conjured up that woman's worst fears: human/animal hybrids, evil cloning, all in conjunction with terrorist attacks using technology we don't (and are not allowed) to understand. Karl Rove is an evil genius. I wish he had never set foot in Washington, D.C.

  Permalink Friday, February 10, 2006 10:57 AM