The Culture of Fear: Why Americas are Afraid of the Wrong Things

One of the most amazing parts about graduating is the time I've had to read whatever it is I want. On vacation, that has meant I worked my way through a series of books I bought a million years ago and never had time to read. This is one of those books. The full title of the book is: The Culture of Fear-Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage & So Much More. It is written by Barry Glassner who is a professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.

It will be rare that I give an all-out recommendation to read a book (meaning, I am glad I read it), but these 200 pages are certainly worth a journey through. While he has 48 pages of notes and citations, I am sure Glassner still writes through a lens of slight political leftism that may turn off some readers. Even if you don't count yourself among the 'besties of the lefties' as I like to call us, there are general theories about what drives fear in our culture. There are also two great chapters on "Black Men: How to Perpetuate Prejudice Without Really Trying" and how single mothers are not the end of America as we know it.

Here's some things I'm gonna take away:
1. The bottom line is that "The success of a scare [such as H1N1] depends on how well it is expressed [and] on how well it expresses our deeper cultural anxieties" (208). The last part is the huge key to the text. What people are hysterical over isn't the thing they say they are hysterical about...it is what that object signifies. For example, H1N1 perhaps is really about our fear of not having control over biological diseases or Americans tumultuous relationship with Mexico (even immigration?).

2. While it is a cliche to blame everything on the media, there is a reality that they do have a lot of power and the choices they make affect what information we receive. That is changing now with the internet and people like me who choose to make their voices heard outside of hierarchical bureaucracies like newsrooms. "A veteran reporter at the Los Angeles Times (who prefers that I not use her name) [shared] 'an expression around the newsroom...News is what happens to your editors'" (201). This means that our news is shaped by the life experiences, fears and interests of a small group of people, thus it is extremely difficult to be 'unbiased'.

3. Something else about the media. News is what people do not expect to happen, which provides the media's explanation for why black people are not covered when killed (unless innocent bystanders to gang violence) but white people are: "Everyone expects black crime victims, the argument goes, so their plight isn't newsworthy" (113).

4. Hysteria about crack babies has nothing to do with crack babies. Ira Chasnoff, "a Chicago pediatrician" feels that media "coverage of crack babies was perpetuating what he termed an 'us -versus-them idea' about poor children. And when a journalist asked him to comment on studies suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure has a slight impact on IQ, he replied, 'The greatest impediment to cognitive development is young children in poverty'" (82-83). The cocaine baby hysteria, it seems, was more about Americans' "fear that the young, having been cheated and neglected, would become 'an unmanageable multitude' or a 'lost generation'" (83).

5. Someone send this to Ann Coulter: "These claims [that single mothers are destroying America] are absurd on their face. An agglomeration of impoverished young women, whose collective wealth and influence would not add up to that of a single Fortune 100 company, do not have the capacity to destroy America" (91). The reality is that "Teen pregnancy was [and is] largely a response to the nation's educational and economic decline, not the other way around" (91). What accounts for higher rates of 'less successful' people born to single mothers is "attributable almost entirely to preexisting circumstance-particularly poverty and poor educational opportunities..." (91). There's a lot more important stuff in that chapter, but I just had to get that out there. Well, that and the fact that "The teenage birth rates reached its highest level in the 1950s" (93). So much for this generation ruining a 'perfect' America.