Is America admired?
Not as much as we like to think.
Is our fear of terrorism legit? Well, you can certainly make a case for thinking “not really.” But fear is useful to politicians and even more useful to media. Between the two, we’re being handed — day after day — not just snake oil but live rattlers.
Politicians sell themselves to voters by using scare tactics. Cable news stations use fear to sell their programs to viewers. Advocacy groups do the same to sell memberships, realtors use it to sell homes in gated communities, the list goes on. Indeed fear was a marketing tool even before the age of terror.Scary stories garner attention and provoke action more efficiently than do rational arguments. When frightened, we react viscerally and want to take action to protect ourselves and our communities. But what has changed more recently is the cultural narrative through which fear is used to garner attention. …BarryGlassner,NYT
Demagogues — like Trump — depend on fear for votes. It’s not just Trump and others on the campaign trails of America. The media are the worst offenders — from right-leaning press to movie studios. A parallel con game comes from self-styled “patriots,” from politicians to the military and to corporate America.
Glassner points out there has been a shift in our identification of where America’s problems lie. For several decades, he writes, we feared internal villains including “American teenagers pillaging America’s cities and towns — ‘a paradigm shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call ‘the superpredators’,” as William Bennett, the former secretary of education, and John DiIulio, a criminologist, described young American males in 1996. Their sisters fared no better, with President Bill Clinton in his 1995 State of the Union address declaring teen mothers America’s ‘most serious social problem.’”
Then came 9/11 and an opportunity to point at external threats like fictional “weapons of mass destruction spooky Muslim “extremists.”
In the newer narrative, the United States is portrayed as the envy of the world, and the storyline is about a great nation pulling together to fight a common enemy. The villains are from foreign lands, and the heroes are soldiers and border guards. …BarryGlassner,NYT
Above all, we like to think of ourselves as enviable and admirable. That’s a pretty dangerous self-delusion. Maybe we’d be a lot less scared — and have much better representation in Washington –if we were willing to accept who we are.