The Fear Factory

[jose v]

Americans used to be known around the world for their pioneering spirit, their bold individualism, their brashness and ballsiness. We live now in a culture of fear, anxiety, paranoia and insecurity. We're afraid, literally, of everything. We're afraid of sickness, afraid of death, and afraid to really live. We're afraid of sex. We're afraid of food. We're afraid of the air, the water, the soil, the weather. We're afraid of sunshine, for Lord sake. We've slathered on so much sunscreen that rickets is making a comeback. We're afraid that the planet itself is rejecting us.
We're afraid of strangers, outsiders and "aliens." That they're infecting us with their bombs, their bodies, their beliefs. Not just foreign terrorists, but even poor Latin American migrants. They come here to do the work we think is beneath us — mow our lawns, make our beds, watch our kids while we're off doing more important things — but throughout much of the West and Southwest American Sissies are in a hysterical panic about them, as though they were a viral infection (a favorite Sissy metaphor).

We're afraid that our neighbors are predators, afraid that our children are sex-crazed, and afraid of ourselves — our own bodies, our minds, our thoughts, our urges. We overmedicate ourselves and our children to repress these urges.

We're afraid of the real world, of reality itself, so we do whatever we can to ignore it, to insulate ourselves from it, to guard and protect ourselves against it, and to escape from it. We loll in a safely-padded, rounded-corners virtual fantasy world, our seatbelts tightly secured and our helmets strapped on, fighting virtual fights, having on-line relationships and sex. We're a lot more familiar and comfortable with this escapist fantasy world and the fantastic creatures that inhabit it — the celebrities and celebutards, the Facebook friendsters — than with the real world outside the bubble. We are quickly transforming our cities — the last zones of wild, unplanned, messy, chaotic human interaction — into safe, clean, playland replicas where everyone, visitor or resident, is a tourist.

It started with the daily drumbeat of nuclear gloom during the Cold War. Growing up in that era instilled a level of fear and anxiety in the boomer generation, which they passed down to their children, and their children to their children.


By the 1970s the general level of anxiety was so high that it took no effort for rumormongering media to whip what were little more than urban legends into full-on nationwide blind panics. The razor-blades-in-apples legend almost killed Halloween. A few bottles of poisoned aspirin in and around Chicago prompted the obsession with tamper-proof packaging that now makes opening a bottle of aspirin such a headache. This blossomed into the mania for hermetically sealing every product from apples to Apples in bombproof, very eco-unfriendly plastic, and for sticking warning labels on every single available surface.

A few scary tales about hitchhikers was all it took to kill that time-honored mode of cheap transportation, one that had brought millions of strangers together for brief periods of good old American how-do-where-ya-headed? camaraderie over many years. The kids-on-milk-cartons campaigns of the '80s insured that millions of Americans imbibed a morbid dread of strangers along with their Wheaties and coffee every morning. All told the campaign was estimated to have assisted in the return of something under 1,500 "missing" children, the vast majority of whom proved to be either runaways or kids spirited off by one parent from the other.

British sociologist Frank Furedi, who has written brilliantly about our culture of fear, reminds us that through the darkest days of Cold War paranoia a popular and ubiquitous cartoon character was the bearded, wild-eyed religious fanatic carrying a big sign that said, "Repent! The End Is Near!" He was an extremist, a representative of the lunatic fringe, a figure of fun. Today, we've all become that guy. His apocalyptic hysteria has migrated from the fringe to the mainstream. And we're not laughing.

Many of the Americans who lived under the umbrella cloud of the Cold War had already survived the real apocalyptic horrors of World War II, and the widespread deprivation and despair of the Great Depression. Many could remember World War I and the Great Influenza Pandemic and other real horror shows. It all gave them a little perspective. Gallows humor is easier if you've actually slipped the noose.

Most American Sissies alive today have known only times of unprecedented peace, prosperity and security. We're Hobbits. We live longer, safer, more coddled lives than any Americans before us. Those predecessors set it up this way for us, and I suppose we should be grateful to them for it — except that it has undeniably Sissified us. We have lived our lives being stampeded into a panic about one largely theoretical, and often bogus, threat after another. We can't laugh them off so easily, because we have no real-world experiences to compare them with and see how silly and nonthreatening many of these "threats" are.

It's precisely because we're so safe and secure that we're so easily frightened. Citizens of the greatest superpower in the history of mankind, insulated from the big, bad world, we're more frightened of the real world than ever. Facing few legitimate dangers in our daily lives, we act as though everything were dangerous. Having banished disease and death to the far corners of our society, we're morbidly fascinated with death and wimpily neurotic about our health. Safer than ever, we're obsessively safety-conscious.

We're not the only Sissies in the world. The Swedes, those Vikings-in-Volvos, are the Sissies of Northern Europe. They drive the safest cars in the world, on the safest highways, ride the safest bikes, inhabit the safest houses, and have the lowest accident rate in the industrialized world. And still they obsess about making it safer. One Stockholm psychologist calls Swedes "safety junkies" who are "suffering from a national panic syndrome."

A Danish shrink coined the term "curling parent." Curling is that wacky "sport" where skaters with brooms maniacally sweep the ice clean in front of a sliding "curling stone." Shuffleboard On Ice. In slow motion. The shrink used it as a metaphor for the way safety-junkie parents go crazy trying to make life's path safe, clean and smooth for their kids. He wondered what will happen to those kids when they grow up, leave their parents' overprotective care, and find that life isn't always so smooth and clean and safe and slo-mo.

You know who still play real sports? The Irish. We could do worse than to spread Irish football the length and breadth of Sissy Nation. It's the manliest manly sport I've ever watched. It looks like a brutal combination of American football, rugby, bare-knuckle kickboxing and gang warfare. There's no padding, and no time-outs — if a player goes down, everybody just runs over him. They run constantly, back and forth, back and forth, without pause, except when they slam into each other and go flying ass over charlie into the air. By the second half everybody's bruised and battered and out for blood, and games tend to unravel into donnybrooks in the last ten minutes. But when the final whistle blows, they all head to the nearest pub together. It's glorious mayhem — and I've only seen the way the men play it. There are women's teams too, and I bet they're awesome fierce.

There's also Irish hurling, which bears absolutely no resemblance to curling. Hurling may be an even more berserker sport than Irish football. I suspect the ancient Celts invented hurling to toughen themselves up for battle with the Vikings. It's the barbarian version of lacrosse, wherein two teams of lunatics swinging thick wooden axes run back and forth bashing and tripping one another. Oh yeah, there's a ball involved. It's hard as steel, and they bat it at one another with the speed of a cannon shot. It could take your head off. Spectators spend half the game ducking for cover as wayward shots scream overhead. It's one sport that gives you a work-out just watching.

Sadly, it's utterly impossible to picture the average American soccer mom dropping Li'l Sissy off at hurling practice, and a game of Irish football played by American Sissies would end in tears and lawsuits within the first ten minutes.

It's no wonder so many American kids have become grublike lumps of protoplasm permanently affixed to the TV and the Xbox. Their parents have panic attacks every time they step out the door.