When Good People Fear the Wrong Things

It was a terrifying book, a nonfiction, footnoted tiptoe through the most appalling menagerie of killer diseases lying in wait--Marburg, Ebola, Lassa--and I could not put it down.

The reading of it made me so obliviously rapt that there came a slip betwixt cup and lip, and a shower of scalding tea splattered down my torso, sending me yowling off for ice.

And there you have, in a moment’s carelessness, the point of this column:

We fret away days and lie awake nights fearing the wrong things. The plane crash instead of the car wreck. Flesh-eating bacteria instead of heart disease. Children murdered instead of children neglected to death. Mayhem from strangers instead of mayhem from friends and family. Ebola virus instead of hot-tea burns. The longshot instead of the nearer thing.

Barry Glassner’s book is called “The Culture of Fear,” and I didn’t need to read past the subtitle, “Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things,” to compile my own list of ingredients in our national fear souffle, trendy scares that puff up into huge stories and then deflate when someone sticks the fork of scrutiny into them: wilding, satanic cults, Alar, freeway shootings, recovered memory syndrome . . . need I go on?

Glassner heard the tumblers click into place in 1992, when Murphy Brown and unwed mothers were suddenly a threat to the republic, blamed for every manner of ill, including the nation’s faltering position in international trade: No dad = dollar bad.

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Glassner is not only a USC sociologist, he is a magician, a Magic Castle member who knows a trick called “misdirection” when he sees it.

Misdirection is the magician’s art of deliberate distraction, making the audience look away from where the real action is going on toward someplace where nothing important is happening. In the real-life “just say no” decade, says Glassner by way of example, “our attention was being directed away from lack of support for public schools and general uninterest in providing for young people toward drug scares. If you experiment with marijuana, you’re not likely to be a serious drug user, but if you’re malnourished for the same period of time, you’re likely to have serious problems throughout your life.”

The more Glassner thought about it, the longer his list got:

Road rage: big news, small numbers; drunk driving is 85 times deadlier than road rage.

Stolen kids: for every Polly Klaas snatched from her bed by a murderous stranger, there are a hundred kids spirited away, all right, but by their own noncustodial parents.

Doctored Halloween candy: in the 40 years since the first scare, no confirmed injuries or deaths from strangers’ sweets.

Killer moms: for every Susan Smith, there are dozens of dads, stepdads and boyfriends beating and killing children.

Glassner chose to write about fear out of proportion to reality, fear as a marketable commodity, from car alarms to TV newsmagazine shows. “There are a lot of industries that make money off fear; there’s a fear industrial complex out there,” from “teasers” for TV news that don’t tell you that gruesome school murder happened 2,000 miles away, to the scary stuff on the 11 o’clock news at bedtime, to the scary updates over the clock radio at 6 a.m., to the mailbox, where conservative groups warn that soon students will be banned from praying and liberal groups warn that soon students will be forced to pray, so please send money.

On closer scrutiny these “trends” often fall apart. That hyped “100% increase in terrorist bombings last year” means it doubled all right, from two bombings to four. Glassner found that from 1990 to 1997, the nation’s real murder rate declined 20%, but the murder rate as selected and aired on network news stories increased by more than 600%.

Americans often prefer their skewed perceptions to reality. “As individuals, we feel like things are falling apart in our own lives. If we can project that onto the grand state of society, then we’re just fitting right in, and what’s happening to us is part of a bigger picture.”

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Glassner doesn’t peddle the FDR mantra that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. There’s some bad stuff out there, but it often isn’t the stuff we lose sleep over. “The big danger is that you come off saying there’s nothing to fear. That’s exactly not my point. There’s a great deal to fear, but let’s make sure it’s the right thing, not misplaced fears or exaggerated fears.” Among the real things he lists are a population that’s under-educated, ill-housed, over-armed and inadequately doctored

And the biggest danger of all is in avoiding those realities, letting the headline-grabbers eat up the public’s time and money and energy. Politicians find misdirection a convenient dodge, “avoiding dealing with problems that their ideologies won’t allow them to face head-on.”

I told him my own test: Do I know anyone who has been carjacked? Bombed by terrorists? Cyberstalked? So far the answer is no, a fairly accurate portrait for my race and age. “Every time there’s a new fear trend,” he says, “we should be saying to ourselves, ‘Three weeks from now we’ll be hearing it wasn’t as bad as all that, and maybe it didn’t happen at all. But then again, most people don’t have the time or the interest or the commitment to read on for the next three weeks to discover that.”