Grotesque Malevolent Koala

The politics of fear

TERRORISM IS THE ULTIMATE MISUSE OF FEAR FOR POLITICAL ENDS. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual dangers that the terrorists are capable of posing. That is one of the reasons it was so troubling to so many when the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy, extensive investigation in Iraq for the Bush administration with these words: "We were all wrong." The real meaning of those words, and of Kay's devastating verdict, is that for more than two years, President George W. Bush and his administration have been (wittingly or unwittingly) distorting America's political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger posed by Iraq. Now how could that happen? Could it possibly have been intentional? It's a serious question--more serious than the laughter from the audience might imply. And there are some clues to the answer.

Here's one: the fear campaign aimed at invading Iraq was precisely timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002. You remember that campaign? The one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic? The curious timing was actually explained by the president's chief of staff as a marketing decision. It was timed, he said, for the post-Labor Day advertising period because that's when advertising campaigns for "a new product"--as he referred to it--are normally launched. The implication of his metaphor was that the "old product"--the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda--had lost some of its pizzazz. And so, in the immediate run-up to the election campaign of 2002, a "new product"--the war against Iraq--was being launched.

For everything there is a season, particularly for the politics of fear. Here's another clue: the fear campaign did serve to distract the American people and divert attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were after all, if you look back, beginning to seriously worry the White House in the summer of 2002. So they needed to change the subject.

And of course the third clue is to be found in the now voluminous evidence that a powerful clique inside the administration that had been aggressively agitating for war against Iraq since before the 2001 inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what it had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and did not threaten us.

The members of that clique were clever and they managed to get the job done. But it is now painfully obvious to most people that, in the process, some deceitfulness took place. There hasn't been specific responsibility assigned for this deceitfulness yet, but it's being investigated by the president.

The so-called intelligence concerning the threat posed by Iraq was stretched beyond recognition, distorted and misrepresented. Indeed, some of the intelligence that the president personally presented to the American people on national television in his State of the Union address turned out to have been actually forged by someone, though we still do not know who. And amazingly enough the White House still doesn't seem to really care who forged that document.

Imagine for a moment that you were president of the United States. It's not that hard. And imagine that you were standing before a joint session of Congress on live national television, speaking on the one occasion of the year when the Constitution of our nation commands the president to report directly to the Congress and the American people about the State of the Union. Imagine that on this solemn occasion, you delivered an important message on the grave issue of war and peace. And then imagine that after your speech the United Nations publicly announced that the document you had been given was a forgery.

Would you be embarrassed? Would you be interested in who forged the document and why? Would you demand to know how it got into your hands and why you were allowed to use it in your State of the Union address? Would you ask for someone to be accountable for it?

Sherlock Holmes wrote a famous story in which the key clue was the dog that didn't bark. The White House hasn't even growled about who forged the document that got into the hands of the president of the United States and was used on national television.

I'm curious. Who forged that document? And why has no one pursued it? The CIA warned the president's staff, we are told, not to let him use that particular document, but it seems that there was some kind of regrettable communications foul-up inside the National Security Council. Indeed, it seems to me there have been a lot of those foul-ups--too many for the president to keep up with. And far more than the nation should tolerate.

Over the past 18 months I have written and delivered a series of speeches addressing different aspects of President Bush's policy agenda, including two on his decision to go to war in Iraq under what I regard as patently false pretenses, one on his dangerous assault on civil liberties here at home, several on his outrageously fraudulent economic policy, and several more on his complete and total failure to protect the global environment--indeed his open invitation to those most responsible for polluting it to step up the pace.

In preparing and delivering speeches on these and other related topics, initially my purposes were limited in each case to the subject matter of the specific speech. However, as I tried to interpret what was driving these various and separate policies, certain common features became obvious and a clear pattern emerged. In every case there was a determined disinterest in the facts. For example, the president's incuriosity about the forged document I referred to earlier is in keeping with the incuriosity shown by the president during an extra hour-long meeting with his new treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill--a meeting O'Neill recounts with astonishment in his recent book. Again, can you imagine being president and hiring someone to head your economic policies and then never asking a single question about those policies during your first protracted meeting with him on the topic? In any case, the first obvious pattern to me was the president's incuriosity about the substance of his policies or even the basic facts in each of these areas.

The second pattern common to the president's approach to all of these areas was an inflexible insistence on carrying out preconceived policies regardless of the evidence concerning what might work and what clearly would not work. In the words of Lewis Carroll: "First the verdict, then the trial."

Third, there is in each area a blatant and consistent bias favoring the wealthy and powerful (particularly key members of his electoral coalition) at the expense of the broader public interest.

Fourth, there has been a marked tendency to develop all the administration's policies in secret, and thereby avoid any accountability to the people, to the Congress, to the courts, or to the press.

Moreover, fifth, in each case there has been a disturbing willingness--even eagerness--to misrepresent the true nature of the policy involved and its real implications.

And sixth, no matter what the issue, it is now clear that in every instance the administration has resorted to the language and politics of fear to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward in a rush without regard to the evidence or the truth and without any regard for the public interest.

For example, the administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11 in order to create a political case for attacking Iraq, even though no facts to justify a connection between Iraq and the attack of September 11 could be found.

Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with Al Qaeda. Iraq was said to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated into bringing war to the terrorists, even though what the adventure in Iraq really meant was diverting resources away from the pursuit of the people who actually attacked us. And it meant causing us to lose focus on that critical task.

The administration also did not hesitate to use fear of terrorism to launch a broadside attack on measures that have been in place for a generation to prevent a repetition of gross abuses of authority by the FBI and the intelligence community that occurred at the height of the cold war. I served on the House Select Committee on Intelligence immediately after the period when the revelations of these abuses led to major reforms. And conservatives on that panel were still resisting those changes and safeguards tooth and nail. They have long memories and now these same constraints have been targeted in the Patriot Act and have been either removed or sharply diminished. And of course the president wants the Patriot Act extended and made permanent.

Incidentally, I was encouraged when his political appeal for renewal of the Patriot Act in his State of the Union address was met with tepid applause at best on both sides of the aisle. I viewed that as one of the few bright spots in that speech.

Nor did the administration show any scruples at using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution to create a class of permanent prisoners and to make it possible to imprison American citizens without due process for the first time in American history: to snatch an American citizen off of the street, put him or her in prison without allowing that citizen to see a lawyer, to see his family, to make a telephone call, to be told what the charges are, or to have any access to due process for the courts.

The president did not hesitate to totally sequester information about policies and about people, not just from the people themselves, but from the Congress and from the courts as well. All of which was justified by recourse to fear.

Our nation has gone through other periods in our history when the misuse of fear resulted in abuses of civil liberties: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through 1800, the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I. Indeed, this distinguished university was founded by acts of conscience and courage in the direct aftermath of the Red Scare following World War I.

In World War II the internment of Japanese-Americans was a shameful episode. Then there were the McCarthy abuses of the early cold war period. After each of these periods of excess we as a nation felt rightly ashamed and tried to make up for the abuses--with monetary payments in some cases, with apologies, with new laws and new protections. And although we have not yet entered the inevitable period of regret and atonement this time around, it is already obvious that we are now recognizing that we are in the midst of one of those periods of regrettable excess.

The administration also did not hesitate to use the politics of fear in economic policy. The fear of a recession was put forth as an argument for massive tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthiest, while loading debt on the rest of the country for generations to come.

It used fear of energy shortages to build an energy policy made to order for the oil industry at the expense, again, of the rest of us.

It used the fear that we would somehow lose a competitive edge to block responsible action to deal with global warming, and the administration has by that action mortgaged not only our lives but those of our children and their children to consequences that are unmitigated by any acts of foresight in this generation. Meanwhile, even the Chinese have now passed us in fuel economy standards for new automobiles, to cite but one example.

This administration uses fear of the problems of old age to contrive an illusory drug bill that essentially transfers billions from the people to the pockets of the large pharmaceutical companies.

It does not hesitate to use fear even of God not only to pronounce its own views on intimacy and marriage but to try to impose those narrow-minded views on the nation in the form of a constitutional amendment at election time.

At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear. That is the real meaning of shock and awe. It is this administration's theory that America should seek "dominance"--to use its word--over the world, coupled with a doctrine of preemptive strikes, regardless of whether the perceived threat to be preempted is imminent or not. And incidentally, today George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, made it clear that the CIA never said Iraq was an "imminent" threat. But of course, under their doctrine, the threat to be preempted doesn't have to be imminent.

And this combination of policies, according to the administration, will be sufficient to persuade our rivals and enemies to leave the field and cower in our presence.

BUT IN ADDITION TO ASKING THAT QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT the administration's use of fear to manipulate the political process was intentional, I think there is another question that urgently needs attention. How could our precious nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to what became such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics? After all, it is a serious indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe, falsely, that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks of September 11.

It is an indictment of the healthy functioning of our democracy that nearly half of all Americans still believe, falsely, that most of the hijackers on September 11 were Iraqis. It is also an indictment of the way our democracy is presently operating that more than 40 percent were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons. When David Kay said, "we were all wrong," he was speaking for the administration and the intelligence community, and the national security experts. But he could just as easily have been speaking for the entire country.

So how did this happen in our beloved America? A free press is supposed to function as our democracy's immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. What happened? Well, for one thing there's been a dramatic change in the nature of what the philosopher Jurgen Habermas has described as the "structure of the public forum"--that is, the virtual space in which our political discourse takes place. The hard truth is that our national conversation no longer operates as it once did. Our public discourse is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

You could say that the age of print effectively ended in the early 1960s when television overtook newspapers as the source of information for the majority of America. And that gap has grown dramatically since then. Today only 17 percent of college students read newspapers. And the dominant medium of political discourse now is of course the 30-second television commercial.

Some of the neurologists and brain researchers who will speak at this conference will describe how images--not only the image of the planes hitting the towers and the Pentagon, but other images of murders on the six o'clock news--go straight to a part of the brain that is not mediated by language or reasoned analysis.

In the news business of today, the common saying--which I'm sure all have you have heard--is "if it bleeds, it leads." And then some add: "if it thinks, it stinks." And the competition is focused on who can, again to use the vernacular, "glue eyeballs to the screen."

The ownership of the media companies has also changed and it's now rare for a media operation to be an independent family business with a deep pride in its independence and a journalistic tradition that has survived over generations. They are now mostly part of conglomerates. (Does that make a difference? Perhaps another conference on another day.) But where the political system is concerned it is a fact that the leadership of the Republican Party is augmented by its links to the corporate ownership of these conglomerates that control the majority of media outlets that dominate the news delivery process today. This is a process of ownership change that is already so far advanced that it alarmed even some conservative Republican members of Congress and caused them to join with members of the Democratic Party to oppose the FCC's efforts to make the world of information even safer for monopoly.

There is still maneuvering to accelerate that consolidation process, and the president still hopes to carry the day. In any case, when errors of fact and judgment are no longer caught and attached by the natural immune system of our democracy it is time to examine the nature of that dysfunction and to promote the recovery of good health in our political discourse. The current dysfunction, after all, includes a growing part of the electronic media that is characterized by paranoia presented as entertainment. This is the part that allows drug-addled hypocrites, compulsive gamblers, and assorted religious bigots to masquerade as moral guides for the nation.

And what are the consequences? Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

THIS DISTURBING DEVELOPMENT ALSO REQUIRES US TO PAY MORE attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our thinking process. Again, the experts on the panels tomorrow have much that is new in their respective fields to share. I'm told by those who I respect in the fields of neurology and brain science that this era is similar to the era when Galileo first used the telescope to deliver a new understanding of the way our solar system actually operates. For most of the last century the study of the human brain was based on individuals who had freak accidents and unusual injuries, and the doctors would pay attention to what part of the brain was taken out by the injury. After careful observation of strange behaviors, they would slowly piece together which functions were controlled by the part of the brain that had been injured.

Now there is the equivalent of Galileo's telescope in brain science. And scientists are able to observe healthy brains in the midst of normal operation, and actively measure the electrical activity and the other indications of exactly what parts of the brain are most active at what times.

An entirely new understanding is emerging, and it is incredibly exciting. And one of the areas that has been richest in its contribution of new understandings about how we as human beings function is the area of inquiry that has to do with fear.

In political theory the common, if usually unstated, assumption is that citizens operate as rational human beings, reasoning their way through the problems that are presented in the political system as if every question, every problem, and every opportunity can be resolved into words and debated, analyzed rationally, and subjected to a discourse with others until there is a reasoned conclusion. But as these scientists will make clear tomorrow, that's actually not the way it works at all. There are other structures that operate, to a large degree, independently of the reasoning process. And when fear is activated it is very difficult to turn off.

Fear was activated on September 11 in all of us to a greater or lesser degree. And because it was difficult to modulate or to change in particular specifics, it was exploitable for a variety of purposes unrelated to the initial cause of the fear. When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation--in the same speech in which he used the forged document--he asked the nation to "imagine" how fearful it would feel if Saddam Hussein gave a nuclear weapon to terrorists who then exploded it in our country. Because our nation had been subjected to the fearful, tragic, cruel attack of 9/11, when our president asked us to imagine with him a new fear, it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process, and short-circuit the normal discourse that takes place in a healthy democracy with a give and take among people who could say, Wait a minute Mr. President. Where's your evidence? There is no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

At one point, President Bush actually said, "You can't distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." He actually said that. And once again because of what these experts will talk about in ways that I could never talk about tomorrow, the period following 9/11 was a time of great vulnerability for our country. And during that time, we placed our trust in President Bush.

I personally placed my trust in President Bush. I went to the Iowa Democratic Convention in the fall of 2001. And I had prepared--I don't mind telling you--during August of that year a very different kind of speech for the Iowa Democratic Convention. But in the aftermath of this tragedy I proudly, with complete and total sincerity, stood before the Democrats of Iowa and said, "George W. Bush is my president. I will follow him, as will we all, in this time of crisis."

I was one of millions who felt that same sentiment and gave to the president total trust and asked him lead us wisely and well.

He abused the trust of the American people by exploiting the fears of the American people in order to take this nation on an adventure that had been preordained and designed before the attacks of September 11 every took place. And the verdict of history will not be a kind one.

OUR FOUNDERS HAD A HEALTHY RESPECT FOR THE ROLE OF FEAR. THE root word for democracy--demos--meant to them as it means to us: the masses of common people, who at that time were an object of some fear in the minds of many who were founders of our nation. What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation. After all, the Revolutionary War was, at least in significant measure, about taxation. And what they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that new society to the ungoverned passions of what today some call the street--to the passions of people with little to lose whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (the same root again).

We need to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans: those who already have achieved material success and those who aspire to it; those who are happy with the status quo and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves. But that tension can never be fully resolved and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may at times be camouflaged. And shortly, I'm going to propose when I think it was that the Republican Party became, for the core group controlling it, merely the nameplate for the radical right in this country.

The radical right is, in fact, a coalition of those who fear other Americans as agents of treason, as agents of confiscatory government, as agents of immorality. This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.

Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility, beginning with the government itself, which it presents as an enemy. This extends to those elected representatives and senators in the opposition party, which the Republicans are presently shutting out of conference committees, and indeed shutting out of any meaningful participation in our nation's legislative and governmental and constitutional processes. And this extends ultimately onto that entire portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by the other party, that is to say, half the nation.

Under these circumstances, it has become natural--perhaps tragic in the classical sense but nonetheless natural--for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power. This phenomenon was clear under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, except it was softened to an extent by the personalities of both men. Under our current President Bush, however, the machinery of fear is right out in the open, operating at full throttle.

Fear and anxiety have always been a part of life and always will be. Fear is ubiquitous and universal in every human society. It is a normal part of the human condition. But we have always defined progress by our success in managing through our fears. Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong--all found success by challenging the unknown and overcoming fear with courage and with a sense of proportion that helped them overcome their real fears without being distracted by distorted and illusory fears.

As with individuals, nations succeed or fail and define their essential character by the way they challenge the unknown and cope with fear. Much depends on the quality of their leadership. If their leaders exploit their fears and use those fears to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, for purposes that are not honestly disclosed, then fear itself can quickly become a self-perpetuating and free-wheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate fear, sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.

Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain. There is a crucial difference.

Fifty years ago, when the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was raising tensions in the world and McCarthyism was threatening our liberties here at home, President Dwight Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America." But only 15 years later, when Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, became president, we saw the beginning of a major change in America's politics.

Nixon, in a sense, embodied that spirit of suppression and suspicion and fear that Eisenhower had denounced. And it first became apparent during the despicable midterm election of 1970, which was waged by Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew.

I saw that campaign first hand. My father, who was the bravest politician I have ever known, was slandered as unpatriotic because he opposed the Vietnam War, and was accused of being an atheist because he opposed a constitutional amendment to foster government-sponsored prayer in the public schools.

I was in the army at the time, on my way to Vietnam as an Army journalist in the engineers. I had leave the week of the election. "Law and Order," court-ordered busing, a campaign of fear emphasizing crime--these were the other big issues that year. It was a sleazy campaign by Nixon, one that is now regarded by political historians as a watershed, marking a sharp decline in the tone of our national discourse.

In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me of Nixon more than any other president.

Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principle to his hunger for reelection. He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his conservative principles as President Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt. After the oil embargo of 1973, we now know from recently disclosed documents that Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Today Bush has actually done it.

Both kept their true intentions secret. Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear. After Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, he confided in one of his regular interlocutors these words: "People react to fear, not love. The don't teach that in Sunday school," he said, "but it's true."

The night before that election 33 years and 3 months ago, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine spoke on national television and said, "There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.

"One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you.

"The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place but it can be shaped to the will of men.

"Cast your vote," he concluded, "for trust in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom."

The next day my father was defeated. Defeated by the politics of fear. But his courage in standing for principle made me proud and inspired me, so that I really felt that he had won something more important than an election.

In his speech that night he stood the old segregationist slogan on its head and defiantly promised, "The truth shall rise again."

I wasn't the only person who heard that promise, nor the only one for whom that hope still rings loudly and true. I hope and believe that this year the politics of fear will be defeated and the truth shall rise again.

Almost 3,000 years ago Solomon warned that where there is no vision the people perish. But the converse is also surely true. Where there is leadership with vision and moral courage the people will flourish and redeem Lincoln's prophesy at Gettysburg that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

A CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR BOB KERREY

BK: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I, like you, have a much easier time finding moments when Republicans use the language of fear than I do when I use the language of fear.

There was a moment in the 2000 campaign when you, or probably your campaign, said to me, we'd like you to campaign for the vice president in the upper peninsula of Michigan and central Pennsylvania, because even though you voted for the Brady bill and the assault rifle ban, for some reason they trust you in those two states, and the Republicans are trying to provoke fear in those places that their guns will be taken away from them.

I went to both places and, after failing to persuade through logic, I found that my most successful approach was to say well, go ahead and vote for Bush if you want, but you're going to lose your job. You're going to lose your healthcare. You're going to lose your pension. But you will have your gun, so you can shoot yourself when it's all over.

Now, between the two of us, we've been involved directly as candidates in 12 campaigns; you 9 since 1976, and I've been a candidate 3 times since 1982. It seems to me as I think about the language of fear, and this is where I want to get your own perception, it seems to me that the fear is typically associated with some fear of loss of some kind.

The great moment was when LBJ suggested that if people voted for Goldwater, they would lose their lives in a nuclear conflagration. But fear of death, fear of loss of health, fear of loss of loved ones, fear of loss of self-respect, fear of loss of a job, your health insurance, and so forth--it seems to me those are the fears, the loss of your guns and fear for your own ability to practice religion--it is common to talk about those sorts of things in language that provokes fear on the part of the audience. I know you never did it, but I must confess I was party to it from time to time.

How do you see it? I mean, is it the fear of loss? What is it the people are afraid of 7 Why does fear motivate?

Vice President Gore: Well, I think there are all kinds of fears, and the main point that I get from these folks that are going to be part of the panels tomorrow is that whatever the cause of the fear, the phenomenon itself is difficult to turn off once it's turned on.

Now, some fears that connect to life and death are obviously the ones that really grab people. But other fears, like the fear of unemployment, are very real, and very powerful, but different. I'm concerned about the economy; incidentally I was the first one laid off in this administration. I can tell you, you never forget something like that. It was just before noon on January 20.

But fear, as I think about it, can be a very healthy thing. It is a natural part of life. We are hardwired to experience fear.

Part of the essence of the human condition is that the intricate design of our species that resulted from our long period of evolution--and I'm always sensitive about getting into evolution. We had a trial my in my home state on this, and we lost--or our creation through evolution, if you prefer, is not always perfectly consistent with the kinds of lives we now live in a modern urban civilization.

The basic fear module, again, is one that goes back to a point very early in our evolution. When we later developed a higher order of thinking, we gained an advantage, obviously, in being able to pick up earlier indications of some emerging threats. We gained the ability to conceptualize instead of just perceive threats. But that meant we also gained the ability to conceptualize imaginary threats. And in groups, if people are led and persuaded to conceptualize threats that are not real, those can also activate the fear response.

Some of the people that you talked to in the upper peninsula and in Pennsylvania had been led to believe that government agents were going to come in and take their guns away from them, together with their ability to defend themselves and their families. This wasn't a real fear, as you and I understood, but to them it felt real.

I'm told there is a phenomenon called "vicarious traumatization." Just as we can conceive of something that activates the amygdala and starts that fear response, if somebody else, a family member, or a member of a group with which we identify, has experienced a traumatic event, it can be communicated to someone who didn't directly experience it. The physical effects--the blood pressure going up, the heart rate increasing--all of those effects are the same as if that individual had actually directly experienced it. When you look at the way this relates to memory, it becomes particularly powerful and troublesome.

One of the discussions in psychology that everybody's been talking about in recent years is posttraumatic stress disorder. This involves rape victims, child-abuse victims, combat veterans--you and I both know people who experienced that in Vietnam, Bob. According to the explanation of it that was given to me, normally when an experience is translated into memory, it's kind of given a sort of "time tag." When you recall that memory later on, you can say, well, that was "before this and after that." Or it was 10 weeks ago or 11 weeks ago.

But when it's a traumatic experience, all bets are off, because then it's coded differently, and the amygdala is activated and the memory is stored differently, so that when it's recalled later on, it doesn't have a time tag. So it feels present. And the memory then has the ability to activate the fear response in the present moment, even though the event occurred a long time ago--because it feels like it's happening right now.

If you combine that phenomenon with the group "vicarious victimization" mechanism, here are two examples of what you get.

In the early summer of 2001, Tipper and I went to Greece. The pope went to Greece while we were there, and he was met by thousands of angry demonstrators holding signs and yelling epithets. I investigated what was going on, and it turned out that they were angry about something that had happened 800 years ago. The Fourth Crusade stopped off in Constantinople on the way to Jerusalem and sacked the city, weakened it for the later overthrow by the Turks. Some people are very angry about that today, 800 years later.

Here's a second quick example: Slobodan Milosevic, in the early summer of 1989, went to the plains of Kosovo on the 600th anniversary of the battle that defeated the Serbian empire in its heyday. The Serbian media said a million and a half people came. And even according to Western estimates, at least a million people came, and were physically present, covering the hillsides to listen to that speech. Milosevic revivified the battle of 600 years earlier and the people felt the pain and victimization. In the immediate aftermath of that collective retraumatization, a genocide began first against the Croats and then the Bosnians and the Kosovars--because there was a vicarious experience of a trauma six centuries earlier that activated in the physical bodies of the individuals present in this generation a response as if they were living through that fear of so long ago.

If you look at the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, if you look at the conflict in Sri Lanka, you look at the conflicts in Africa, you look at Northern Ireland, the Middle East, indeed, if you look at almost every conflict zone in the entire world, it has an element of "amygdala politics" based on "vicarious traumatization," feeding off a memory of past tragedies.

Now, how does our political process address that? Through reasoned discourse? It's insufficient, and we need a new politics that uses new mechanisms like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa or mechanisms that are not yet invented to deal with the interaction of the fears and the reasoning process.

BK: I've listened to Democratic candidates in this presidential campaign, and one of the things I hear, I don't know if it's intentional so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's unintentional, causes people to be afraid of the forces of globalism.

Look at China or India. There are four or five million people in China, living on a buck a day, who need jobs. We say in the United States of America, fine, we're for you getting all those jobs, but please don't try to sell us our cotton at world prices. Please don't try to sell us some of your other products at world prices. We're going to put trade policies in place. And that's the problem. It seems to me that I hear, when I listen closely, that somehow I can stop this.

I heard Warren Buffett say, in a rather grisly metaphor, that from 1914 to 1918 there was a great leap forward in productivity in American agriculture, going from horses for power to tractors for power as a result of the Great War and the loss of productivity in Europe. He said there were 6 million horses that were slaughtered over that four-year period. Then he went on to say that if horses could have voted, it's unlikely that would have happened.

It seems to me that, from our side as well, we use the language of fear to try to get people to say there may be something they can do to stop natural forces and stop the losses that all of us, again, understandably don't want to have in our lives.

AG: I think there's fear and then there's fear. And I think that at least two categories ought to be maintained.

Fear of the economic consequences flowing from a particular set of policies may be very significant and motivating for people, but that's different from the fear that a terrorist is going to set off a nuclear weapon in the city where you live. And economic fears are also different from the kind of fear of violent crime that Nixon used in a very despicable way in that 1970 campaign.

Where physical survival is connected to the conjured fear, it has a qualitatively different aspect. Again, even those fears should be and can be talked about in a responsible way if they're real and if they're dealt with in a way that has integrity. Anything can be translated into a fear of its consequences or a fear of something having to do with it. But I don't think it's the same as exploiting the fear of terrorism.

BK: I don't disagree that there are qualitative differences. Let me take another example. You came to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, representing the fourth district of Tennessee in 1977, I guess. That was your first year. And over that period of time the capitol has been converted into a fortress as a result of what I think is a rather irrational fear of the loss of physical life.

It seems to me that this irrational fear that you're talking about has a nonpolitical origin as well, that one of the things that may be going on in the American political system--the question is, have we, in general, independent of the language that's being used, are we more afraid than we need to be? Is there a greater existential fear today, in 2004, than we need to have?

AG: Yes.

BK: Especially here in the United States of America?

AG: I think there is. One of your conference participants tomorrow has a powerful presentation contrasting the actual statistics on specific threats going down, down, down and the measured fear of those same threats going up, up, up." When the television portrayal of those threats goes up, the manifestations of fear go up accordingly. People who watch the television news routinely have the impression that the cities where they live are far more dangerous than they actually are, because there is an economic advantage for the local news stations that show the crime story first and foremost.

Now the national news, particularly a lot of the national morning programs, will start now with crime stories like that, and God forbid that there's some kind of chase of a criminal out there the television stations will show it for hours and hours because it has a compelling aspect to it.

So I think, yes, fear goes up even when the rational basis for it goes down.

NOTES

* See the essay by Barry Glassner, "Narrative Techniques of Fear Mongering," in this volume.

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