DEL.ICIO.USInciting fears in hard times dangerous
Monday, April 20, 2009
In times like these, there’s money to be made and power to be grabbed by scaring people to death. In fact, while other parts of the economy falter, the American paranoia industry is going great guns: Paranoia production is up; profits are up as well. And if those profits come at the expense of the country’s sanity, well, that’s business.
On CNN, for example, Lou Dobbs is warning Americans of a New World Order that will steal our national sovereignty. His counterpart at Fox, Glenn Beck, is even more deranged, and even more of a ratings hit.
“Why doesn’t (President Obama) just shoot me in the head?” Beck wailed on one recent show. “How much more can he disenfranchise me?” He then poured the contents of a gasoline can on a guest and lit a match, suggesting that Obama was trying to do the same to the country.
Hard times have always been good times for paranoia peddlers. Millions of Americans are without jobs, homes or both; tens of millions of others live in daily fear of joining them. We haven’t seen an economic decline this sharp in three generations, and there’s a sense of a great seismic shift under way, of powerful, unseen forces reshaping our lives and futures in ways we can neither predict nor control.
In addition, the Obama administration is taking steps that in ordinary times would be deemed extraordinary. It is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into banks and financial institutions, and in return demanding influence over their operations. Hundreds of billions more have been appropriated to stimulate the economy, trying to use government to replace private spending.
Those are controversial steps, and they ought to be. We ought to be deeply concerned when government becomes so deeply intertwined with private business, and we ought to ensure it will be temporary. People have every right to worry about the impact of such spending on our national debt and the tax burden of future generations. Those are real issues.
And while I believe such steps are needed to fend off a far steeper economic decline, it is also true that perfectly reasonable people believe otherwise, fearing the Obama approach could lead to even worse problems.
However, the paranoia industry has taken that legitimate fear and stokes it and distorts it. It warns already anxious Americans that the country they love is being stolen from them, that their guns will be confiscated and their children forced into mandatory national service, that the right to dissent will be taken from them.
We have been down this road before, in the mid-’90s, when another Democrat was in the White House and the paranoia industry again found it useful to depict the government as the enemy. It set the scene for tragedies such as Waco, Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City, and today things feel eerily reminiscent of that era. In fact, given the current economic dislocation, the stage could be set for far worse.
One of the biggest stokers of paranoia — and one of its biggest beneficiaries — has been the firearms industry and its de facto lobby, the National Rifle Association. Gun sales are up 40 percent to 50 percent, and the industry has a hard time keeping shelves stocked with ammo. And of course, that shortage is in turn cited as further proof of government perfidy.
And the effect of all that? Well, last week a poster on my blog had some advice for a fellow conservative: “Just pick your targets for the day the revolt begins. There are more of us than them. I figure in a week they’ll all be gone.”
Those we elect as leaders can either calm or stoke that kind of paranoia, and too many have chosen the second course for political gain. They don’t seem to understand that truly crazy, dangerous notions can be made to seem less crazy if they can claim endorsement by a state Legislature, or by someone on national TV, or by the governor of Texas, who last week suggested that Washington had become so repressive that secession from the Union might be worth considering.
Such rhetoric is grossly irresponsible. Texas isn’t going to secede; neither is Georgia. But if you convince frightened people that the federal government is a tyrant out to steal their freedom and their property, you’re the one dousing the country with gasoline.
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