The Culture of Fear (6 page)

In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals. Demented drivers rather than insane public policies occupied center stage in the coverage of road rage. Where reference was made at all to serious problems that drivers face, these were promptly shoved behind a curtain of talk about violent motorists.
“Roads are more crowded all the time, which means more delays and more frustration,” National Public Radio’s Alex Chadwick reported, but rather than pursue the point with insights from, say, experts on mass transit, he quotes someone from the AAA who contends that driving “frees the beast” in people.
¹⁰

In
USA Today
reporter Patrick O’Driscoll notes that 70 percent of urban freeways are clogged at rush hour (up 15 percent over the past fifteen years) and that traffic exceeds road capacity in most U.S. cities. Did he then go on to consider possibilities for relieving the congestion? On the contrary, his next sentence began, “Faced with tempers boiling over like radiators in rush-hour gridlock, police agencies are seeking ways to brand aggressive driving as socially unacceptable . . .”
¹¹

Rather than traffic experts journalists spotlighted police officials, who understandably took the opportunity to urge the hiring of more officers. Or reporters turned to so-called experts such as Arnold Nerenberg, a psychologist who dubs himself “America’s road-rage therapist” and runs a web site (
www.roadrage.com
) where he brags that he has been featured in dozens of TV programs and magazines. Not a researcher, Nerenberg nonetheless offers authoritative-sounding sound bites that support reporters’ portrayal of highway violence as personal pathology. “There’s a deep psychological urge,” he tells
Newsweek
, “to release aggression against an anonymous other.” Road rage is “a mental disorder that is contagious,”
USA Today
quotes him. In an interview with the
New York Times,
Nerenberg called on the American Psychiatric Association to add road rage to its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM). At some point in their lives, he said, more than half of the U.S. population suffers from the disorder, which Nerenberg described on ABC’s “World News Tonight” as “an adjustment reaction disorder.”
¹²

Such psychoblather only obscures what even Nerenberg himself knows to be the primary instrument of murder on the nation’s roadways. Asked directly by
People
magazine whether there is truly any difference between now and twenty years ago, Nerenberg allows, “One thing that makes the problem worse is that we have more Americans arming themselves. Millions of us illegally carry loaded weapons. The more guns in cars, the greater the chance they’ll be used.”
¹³

Most of the coverage of road rage, however, shamelessly disregarded the import of firearms, even though the AAA study found that offenders in road rage incidents often use guns to kill or injure their victims. On Oprah Winfrey’s show devoted to road rage the murder of one driver by another was recounted tearfully and in detail by the victim’s fiancé as well as by the man who killed him. But at no point in the program did anyone mention that the victim would almost certainly have survived had there not been a gun involved. In fact, when Winfrey brought on the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, his only mention of weapons was metaphoric. He referred to cars as “three-thousand-pound weapons.”
¹⁴

Experts who do try to direct attention to the matter of guns seldom succeed. In a road rage story on CNN occasioned by a fatal shooting, the local district attorney counseled against “too many guns in cars” and made a comparison: “When you go to Canada, they ask you, ‘Do you have any guns in your car,’ because you have to check them at their border. If you’re coming from Canada to this country, they ask you if you have any fruit.” Rather than pursue the matter CNN correspondent Dennis O’Hayer promptly shifted the focus. “Even if you don’t have a gun, your own driving tactics could be setting you up for a dangerous face-off,” he said. Someone identified as a traffic columnist with the
Atlanta Constitution
then proceeded to urge viewers against death-defying acts such as “getting in the left lane and holding up traffic.”
¹⁵

One of my initial hypotheses about why pseudodangers receive so much attention was that they provide opportunities to talk about, and perhaps rectify, problems too big to face in their totality. Stupefied by the quantity of guns on the streets, we might focus on doing something about the much smaller number in cars. My hypothesis could not have been farther from the truth. Pseudodangers represent further opportunities to avoid problems we do not want to confront, such as overcrowded roads and the superabundance of guns, as well as those we have grown tired of confronting. An example of the latter is drunk driving, a behavior that causes about eighty-five times as many deaths as road rage (about 17,000 versus 200). Close to half of all fatal traffic crashes involve alcohol, and three in five Americans will be involved in
an alcohol-related crash at some point in their lives. Moved by those statistics and by the advocacy group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, journalists had covered the issue of drunk driving in a sound and sustained way throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Thanks in part to that coverage, the number of alcohol-related highway deaths plunged by 31 percent between 1982 and 1995. Fatality rates fall twice as rapidly, studies find, in years of high media attention compared to those of relatively little attention. Intensive coverage permits passage of powerful laws, creation of sobriety checkpoints, and new notions such as the “designated driver,” all of which save lives.
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Yet by the mid-1990s groups like MADD were finding it difficult to be heard in the media over the noise about road rage and other trendy issues. In the years that followed the fatality rate stopped declining. Polls taken on the eastern seaboard during the late 1990s found people more concerned about road rage than drunk driving. Who could blame them when they read in their local paper, “It’s not drunken or elderly or inexperienced drivers who are wreaking havoc. Instead, scores of people are severely injured or killed every day by stressed-out drivers who have abandoned civil roadway behavior”
(Philadelphia Daily News).
¹⁷

If the first of those two sentences by Don Russell of the
Daily News
inverted the truth about dangerous drivers, the second misled more broadly still. Russell is one of several writers on road rage who alluded to the issue of civility. Reporters variously raised the matter themselves or quoted police officers declaring that “people have forgotten how to be civil to each other”
(USA Today).
In so doing they exemplified another unfortunate hallmark of fear mongering: the tendency to trivialize legitimate concerns even while aggrandizing questionable ones.
¹⁸

Worries about Americans acting uncivilly toward one another date back at least to frontier days, and in our present era bad behavior behind the wheel is far from the most significant or pressing form of incivility. At a time when a disabled black man in Texas was beaten by
racists then chained to a truck and dragged down a road to his death and a gay college student in Wyoming was tied to a fence, pistol-whipped, and left to die, we would do well to focus our sights on big-time incivilities such as racism and homophobia. Instead we are diverted by willy-nilly references in stories about road rage, or worse, by fear mongers who
intentionally
set out to confuse matters.
¹⁹

One of the most effective scare campaigns of the late twentieth century—political correctness on college campuses—was undertaken for the express purpose of changing the terms of debate about civility. The people who generated the scare did not phrase it in those terms, mind you; they couched their alarmism in First Amendment language. In the late 1980s conservative commentators began warning of what they described as “the greatest threat to the First Amendment in our history” (Rush Limbaugh), “the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement” (Walter Williams), and “an ideological virus as deadly as AIDS” (David Horowitz).
²⁰

President George Bush, in a commencement address at the University of Michigan in 1991, put the matter somewhat more soberly when he decried those who would “declare certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.” Some professors and students were indeed urging that certain categories of statements and gestures be eradicated from university life. Specifically, they sought to do away with racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior. If anything qualifies as uncivil in a diverse society, they argued, it is precisely these sorts of acts.
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People who got chastised as PC were trying to create a more respectful and inclusive environment on campuses for groups that largely had been excluded—a goal that conservatives could not attack head-on lest they lose the already limited support they had in minority communities. Besides, far from being First Amendment absolutists themselves, many conservatives eagerly support restraints on a range of behaviors, from flag burning to the display of homoerotic art. So rather than engage in honest debate with campus liberals and progressives, conservatives labeled them “politically correct.” Much the way their forebears had used the epithet “Communist” a few decades earlier, conservatives of the 1990s accused their enemies of being PC. Primarily by means of
anecdotes retold time and again in political speeches, in the news media, and in popular books such as Dinesh D’Souza’s
Illiberal Education
and Roger Kimball’s
Tenured Radical,
they created an impression of armies of PC militants occupying the nation’s colleges and universities.
²²

Conservatives told, for instance, of a mob of 200 at the State University of New York at Binghamton who, armed with sticks and canes, invaded a lecture hall and threatened an elderly man who was giving a talk. According to pieces in the
Wall StreetJournal
(one of them titled “The Return of the Storm Troopers”), the university’s president did nothing about the hooligans because college presidents “live in terror of being politically incorrect.”
²³

Then there was the story of a class at Harvard on feminist theory taught by Alice Jardine, a professor of French. According to Dinesh D’Souza, who sat in on the class one day, a student delivered “ribald one-liners about a man who lost his penis ... and brought loud and un-embarrassed laughter from the professor and other students.”
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Almost invariably, after such stories came out witnesses to the actual events debunked them. Participants at the Binghamton event, as well as a campus police investigator and one of the speakers, reported there had been no violence. The entire incident consisted, they said, of a single student who engaged in disruptive behavior for about four minutes, for which the university placed him on probation. About the class at Harvard, Alice Jardine subsequently explained that the discussion of the missing penis was actually about the myth of Osiris, a deity whose body parts were scattered throughout Egypt. Osiris’s wife, Isis, buried each part as she found them. The phallus was never recovered; images of it, which are used in festivals, can be bought at tourist shops in Egypt.
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Yet information correcting the faulty reports came out mostly in academic books and journals, not in the mass media. The general public was left with a highly inaccurate image of white men being mercilessly jeered and muzzled at America’s public and private universities.

Granted, activists from the political left sometimes behaved with impudence or intolerance. Speakers were shouted down on occasion if they were perceived as racist, sexist, or antigay. The sum of those occurrences did not support, however, a claim that “the delegitimization,
even demonization, of the white male has reached extreme lengths,” as Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, put it in an op-ed in the
San Francisco Examiner
in 1996. Guilefully trading on the memory of the Holocaust, Roberts went on to assert that affronts to white males on college campuses are “comparable to ... the denunciation of Jewry by anti-Semites.”
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Exaggerated assertions of that kind received more public notice than did the true patterns of discrimination and exclusion on U.S. campuses. Perhaps editors despaired of being called PC themselves if they ran the story, but there was an important story to be told. The data were rather shocking: on the eve of the twenty-first century women, blacks, and Hispanics, far from displacing white males in the professorate, mostly hold jobs at lower ranks and with lower pay. At the height of the PC scare, in the early and mid-1990s, women made up less than one-third of full-time faculty at American colleges and universities, a figure just slightly higher than in 1920, when women won the right to vote. Only about one in twenty professors was Hispanic or African American.

Research on students documented additional disturbing trends. Women and students of color often received less attention and encouragement in classrooms than did their white male counterparts, and outside of class they were the targets of tens of thousands of verbal and physical attacks each year. Gay and lesbian students likewise faced assaults, bigotry, and death threats. Even at famously liberal colleges gays and lesbians experienced prejudice. In a survey at Yale almost all gay and lesbian students said they had overheard antigay remarks, and one in four had been threatened. At Oberlin College nearly half of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students said they have to censor themselves when discussing gay issues.