The view from the panic room

The 20th century was once dubbed the American century. It was also known as the age of anxiety. Anyone waylaid by the 24-hour infotainment channels that pass for the mainstream US news networks over the last month would have taken the embryonic 21st century for the age of American anxiety.

Holidaying in New England over Christmas, this writer encountered two entirely separate continents inhabiting the same spatial-temporal zone. There was the larger, saner, soft-spoken America, where people went about their business and leisure as usual, tending to last minute shopping chores, roasting turkey, sinking beers and generally behaving like any nation under a holiday groove. Then there was the smaller, meaner, louder Amerika that flickered into life anytime the television was turned on, a state of emergency conjured up by Homelands Security scaremongers and fed to the ventriloquist’s dummies at CNN and Fox, Newspeak-spouting Lord Haw-Haws (or should that be, Lord Yee-Haws) with their chops in an advanced state of truth decay. Monitoring the feeds, the viewer couldn’t help but feel stuck in a loop of War Of The Worlds radio broadcast re-runs, with the Iraqis, Al Qaeda and the North Koreans substituting for the Red Planet menace.
So, when the Homelands honchos ramped up the security risk to the second highest level as the Christmas season kicked in, fearing terrorist attacks on commercial and freight airlines, the networks wasted no time in milking it. Randomly flick past Fox and there it was, a red banner flagging HIGH ALERT status. No matter how many times one inadvertently zapped onto it, that banner retained the power to jolt, giving the impression of breaking news when in fact there was no news breaking.
As belaboured in Bowling For Columbine, fear and loathing are the fossils that fuel American industry, fear and loathing of not only its adversaries but also its own people. The real threats, from Pearl Harbour to 9/11, come unheralded, but bogeys like the Millennium Bug and Saddam’s WMD get co-opted by corporate media in order to spook the American people into purchasing warehouse quantities of canned foods, bottled water, iodine, firearms, security alarms, flame-resistant suits, tin foil window blinds, air purifying systems, anti-bacterial soaps and carpet cleaning agents. And of course, cable subscriptions.
The greater immediate threat here is not the possibility of terrorist attacks, but to the psychic well-being of the most powerful nation in the world, a danger wrought by the implementation of a colour-coded alert system that has been criticised in places as prominent as page one of the New York Times as overly simplistic and unwieldy, a ‘crayola’ codified measure initiated by an administration famous for its lack of subtlety.
For those of us in Europe, to view the US through the cracked glass of the news channels is to see it as a neurotic house-owner whose property was broken into a couple of years ago and as a result has become a paranoiac agoraphobic neurotic cowering in a bolted panic room, monitoring multiple alarm systems and CCTV screens, nursing a gun and trembling by the flickering light of the tube.