“America Is Not A Brave Nation”: Once Again, Fear Has Made Us Our Own Worst Enemy, Has Made Us Stupid
America is not a brave nation.
Yes, that’s a heretical thing to say. Yes, our military is the world’s finest and our servicewomen and men provide daily examples of incontestable courage. Yes, police officers brave bullets, firefighters rush into burning buildings and ordinary Janes stand in harm’s way to save complete strangers on a routine basis. Yes, there are brave people all over this country, people who put self second every day.
But courage is not only about putting self second. Courage is also about who you are in stressful times, about the ability to not be rattled, to act with sound judgment, to keep your head when those about you are, as Rudyard Kipling put it, “losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
And by that standard, no. There are many words you might use to describe the character of this country, but brave isn’t one of them. Rather, we are fraidy-cats and cowards.
We’ve proven this many times since that Tuesday morning in September of 2001 when Islamic extremists kidnapped four planeloads of our fellow citizens and turned them into guided missiles in an attack that ripped away our illusions of security.
We proved it by bungling into a needless war chasing terrorists who were not there, by burning mosques and criminalizing Islam, by compromising basic civil rights for the Great Pumpkin of security.
And we proved it again last Monday when Ahmed was arrested for bringing a clock to school.
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old ninth grader from MacArthur High in Irving, Texas, had built the digital clock at home and was eager to show it to his engineering teacher, who liked it. When his English teacher saw it, however, she thought it looked like a bomb. Next thing he knew, the teenage tinkerer, who wants to be an engineer when he grows up, was under arrest.
There’s a picture of him online that’s heartbreaking: It shows a slight, brown-skinned boy in glasses, looking frightened and confused. He’s wearing a NASA T-shirt. He is also wearing handcuffs.
Ahmed says police told him he was being charged with building a hoax bomb. James McLellan, a spokesman for the Irving police, told local station WFAA, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.”
That, of course, is because it was a clock.
Eventually, whoever has custody of the brain at the Irving PD must have recognized this for the Islamophobic idiocy it was. Ahmed was released. No charges will be filed.
Word of all this set Twitter ablaze. Ahmed has received supportive tweets from Arianna Huffington and Hillary Clinton. Mark Zuckerberg invited him to Facebook. President Obama invited him to the White House. And his ordeal inspired a trending hashtag: #IStandWithAhmed.
Which is good. But one hopes it will also inspire a little soul-searching for this country, which would be better.
Because once again, fear has made us our own worst enemy, has made us stupid. The fact that a bright kid — a kid with initiative, a kid who only wanted to make his teacher proud, a kid who, by all appearances, is precisely what we wish more kids would be — was hauled away in handcuffs for those very attributes ought to make us sober and reflective about the nation we have become in the years since Sept. 11.
One is reminded of the time President George W. Bush strode out on an aircraft carrier beneath a celebratory banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” But given that the primary goal of terrorism is to make people afraid, maybe somebody should find that banner and ship it to al Qaeda.
Judging from what happened to Ahmed, they deserve it more than we ever did.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, September 21, 2014
“Appealing To Fear In The Name Of Security”: Marco Rubio Wants To Scare Americans Into Voting For Him
The 2014 midterm was the election of fear, and offered a likely foreshadowing of the strategy the Republicans will use to try and win the White House in 2016. In the midterms, the GOP stacked up impressive victories by brilliantly stoking a nightmare vision of an America about to be overrun by Ebola patients, anchor babies, and ISIS assassins. In their quest to replace Barack Obama, Republican presidential hopefuls are making the starkest possible case that security is the primary issue, eclipsing all others.
Yesterday, Marco Rubio announced the new theme of his campaign: “The fundamental problem we have in America is that nothing matters if we aren’t safe.” According to Rubio, “The world has never been more dangerous than it is today,” which means “the economic stuff” has to take a backseat to national security. Rubio’s emphasis on safety echoed a remark made by his rival Chris Christie the same day: “You can’t enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin.”
These statements are startling in the all-or-nothing choices they offer. Without security, “nothing matters.” If we don’t have security, we’ll be in a coffin. This black-and-white language negates the possibility that security is one value among others, that it needs to be balanced against competing values such as liberty or peace. It’s hard to imagine cruder appeals to fear.
And by appealing to fear in the name of security, they only ensure they’ll get less of what they say they want.
While some political leaders have relied on fear-mongering since time immemorial, the specific national security based anxiety voiced by Rubio and Christie has a particular lineage. According to George Mason historian Peter N. Stearns in his 2006 book American Fear, “American culture launched a really distinctive approach to fear only in the twentieth century: There was no long legacy of public fearfulness. Indeed, current standards are particularly striking in their contrast with nineteenth-century norms, which quite explicitly called on Americans, at least American men, to face fear directly and stare it down.”
Stearns locates the origins of fear culture in modern American politics in the Cold War. His argument is in keeping with findings of many historians that the very idea of “national security” as a pre-eminent goal crystallized in the early days of America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson said it was necessary to “scare the hell out of the country” in order to shore up support for an anti-communist foreign policy.
In his 1974 work The Logic of World Power, historian Franz Schurmann argued the Cold War consensus was based on “a new ideology” and “the key word and concept in that new ideology was security.” For Schurmann, part of the power of the concept of security was that it encompassed domestic economics as well as foreign policy. Social Security, after all, was the cornerstone of the New Deal. The promise of “national security” as a foreign policy goal was that it would bring the same type of peace of mind that Social Security gave to citizens.
In practice, the excessive weight given to security produced not greater calm but more fear. The search for absolute security could brook no opposition, so the enemy became not just Stalin’s USSR but the idea of communism, leading to a global crusade abroad and an ideological purge at home. As the conservative foreign policy analyst Robert W. Tucker noted in his 1971 book The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, “By interpreting security as a function not only of a balance between states but of the internal order maintained by states, the Truman Doctrine equated America’s security with interests that evidently went well beyond conventional security requirements.”
The hair-trigger overreactions of the early Cold War were revived after 9/11, when policymakers once again launched a global war on the grounds that it was needed to ensure security on the home front. The best articulation of the post-9/11 culture of fear—and the concomitant willingness to do almost anything to secure an impregnable level of safety or security—can be seen in the 1 percent doctrine as articulate by Vice President Dick Cheney: “If there’s a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” In effect, Cheney was calling for the United States to become one giant safe space, even if it meant massively overreacting to threats abroad.
Because of the language of security originated in the New Deal, the earliest critics of this discourse came from the political right. Throughout the early Cold War, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, the stalwart of the Republican right, warned that America was becoming “a garrison state.” In his libertarian classic The Road to Serfdom (1944), F.A. Hayek argued that, “nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom. It is essential that we should relearn frankly to face the fact that freedom can be had only at a price and that as individuals we must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve our liberty.”
Hayek was of course writing about the economic realm, but his insistence that security needed to be balanced against liberty applies just as well to foreign policy. If Rubio and Christie had any interest in moving beyond the politics of fear, they could do well to read that earlier right-wing thinkers warned that the idolatry of security brings not safety but unending jitters and a loss of liberty.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor, The New Republic, May 19, 2015
“Cruz Tells Small Child, ‘Your World Is On Fire'”: Scare Them While They’re Young And You’ll Have Them For Life
For politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), fear is an important motivating tool. Listen to the far-right Texan deliver a typical stump speech and you’ll hear quite a few dire assessments from Cruz about nearly everything.
But as a rule, when politicians address small children, they dial it down a notch. It made a Cruz event in New Hampshire the other day that much more noteworthy.
[Cruz said,] “The Obama economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a train wreck. And the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind – the whole world’s on fire!”
Julie Trant, a child in the audience, took this literally. “The world’s on fire?” she asked.
“The world is on fire, yes,” said Cruz, not missing a beat as the crowd chuckled. “Your world is on fire.”
Let’s note that the child in this story is just three years old. During the event, she was sitting on her mother’s lap.
Cruz quickly added, however, “But you know what? Your mommy’s here, and everyone’s here to make sure that the world you grow up in is even better.”
Let’s unpack this one:
- The “Obama economy,” in reality, is not a disaster. On the contrary, the president’s economic agenda ended the Great Recession, turned the economy around, and created the strongest job growth since the 1990s.
- The Affordable Care Act is not “a train wreck.” On the contrary, the ACA is actually succeeding beautifully, exceeding the expectations of many optimists.
- The whole world is not “on fire,” at least not any more than usual.
- Telling a three-year-old child, “Your world is on fire” is probably inappropriate at any time, but it’s especially unsettling when it’s wrong.
- Telling that same child that Republicans are going to “make sure that the world you grow up in is even better” is odd phrasing. “Even better” usually follows “things are good,” not “things are horrible.”
The child’s mother, for what it’s worth, describes herself as “a huge Ted Cruz supporter” and said during a radio interview this morning that she describes the senator as “Uncle Cruz” to her daughter.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, March 16, 2015
“Beware Of Voting Based On Fears Stoked By Politicians”: Ebola, ISIS, The Border; So Much To Fear, So Little Time!
If there’s a pandemic or crisis that we should really be worried about, it’s this relentless election-time fear-mongering.
If you’re not afraid, you are clearly not paying attention. So much to be fearful of, so little time!
If there is a pandemic to be actually worried about, it’s the pandemic of fear as we approach the midterm elections. Election time almost always is a time for fear-mongering, but this particular season seems to be more so than in the past.
Ebola, a horrific disease for sure, is surely threatening all the people of the United States, despite the tiny number of people who have contracted it while treating people who actually have it. However, the fear of Ebola has infected vast numbers of Americans who will never have the opportunity to come into contact with someone who actually has it. But be afraid!
ISIS, the more common name for the so-called Islamic State, is a threat to everyday Americans. After all, I heard it on Fox News! Although this group of barbaric and inhumane humans is having a tough time conquering the geography they actually inhabit, their real goal is to come after us. And they will do so by simply walking across our Southern border with Mexico, because, you know, that border is so porous and unprotected.
Which brings us to undocumented people in this country. You should be afraid of them too! They’ll take your jobs (never mind that you don’t want to do the burdensome and humble jobs they are willing to do)! They are only here to reap the rewards of the American safety net (such as it is) and thereby raise your taxes.
And in a sleight of hand mindboggling in its absurdity, politicians are combining these three fears into one by getting you exercised over ISIS terrorists coming into the United States from Mexico, infected with Ebola. All because this president (who has presided over more deportations in his first term than George W. Bush did in his entire presidency) refuses to take these fears seriously, as does the entire Democratic Party.
And just for good measure, why don’t we add on our fears about race? It’s interesting, isn’t it, that these Ebola-infected ISIS terrorists are only a threat from our brown-skinned Southern border, not from the white-skinned northern border with Canada? White people, after all, just couldn’t be this bad. The tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent reaction to it, only underscores the threat of a non-white population that is seething with anger and ready to get back at the white population that oppresses them. So much to be afraid of here.
Religion is not immune from fear-mongering either. The famous New England preacher Jonathan Edwards is perhaps most noted for his “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermon, in which he had people collapsing out of fear of a God who dangles them over the burning fires of hell, held by a spider web-thin strand of hope. One gets the impression that God would take great delight in letting them go. Modern religion is no different. Many conservative religionists believe that “they” are coming to get us, to force their secular beliefs on us, and win the so-called War on Religion. Much of the evangelical church seems bent on raising their members’ paranoia and anxiety about the culture that is hostile to them. And it sure does fill the coffers on Sunday morning.
Fear is not necessarily a bad thing. It is indeed the human being’s natural and appropriate response to danger. Jews were right to fear the Nazis. Bicycle riders are prudent to fear being clipped by a passing car. The unemployed have a right to be anxious about the ravages on their families exacted by their unemployment. Americans have a right to fear over-zealous and unwarranted surveillance by the NSA.
Oddly, though, Americans are not fearful enough when it comes to real threats. Humans seem to be the only species that fouls our own nest, perfectly willing not to fear the environmental calamity our present course of inaction will surely wreak on the entire world, unless we reduce our carbon emissions, or entirely deny the science that foretells it. Smokers (I am one) seem entirely willing to live with the danger of self destructive behavior, in hopes of escaping its devastating consequences. Racism, income inequality, and a rising political and financial oligarchy threaten the very existence of American democracy, yet we are paralyzed when it comes to talking honestly about these issues.
But fear of something that is not actually a threat is not rightful fear, but rather paranoia. Feeling under attack may be a great way to raise money in churches and political races, but it’s a terrible way to solve the problems that actually face us. But in order to discern the difference between things that rightly should be feared, and those that shouldn’t, we need to be willing to talk about our fears and face into them. Which brings us to FDR’s first inaugural speech assertion that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Indeed. Nothing may actually threaten America more than our own fears.
Perhaps the worst fallout from all this is that when we are gripped by fear, we usually make terrible decisions. Like in elections. All of us should be going to the polls to vote this week. It is the most important civic duty we have as citizens, and in some ways, it’s the our only shot at changing things for good. But beware of voting based on the fears stoked by politicians for their own political gain — on both sides. It’s a terrible way to make the important decisions about whom to vote for.
And know this: No politician is going to take away your fear and anxiety. If you’re already fearful about contracting Ebola, finding an ISIS terrorist at your door, or the anxiety you feel when you encounter a person of color, you won’t find any relief on the day after the election. That’s work you and I have to do for ourselves, every day. We need to separate trumped-up fears from the legitimate ones. The state of the nation and the state of humankind may depend on it. Now that’s something to be fearful about.
By: Gene Robinson, The Daily Beast, November 2, 2014
“Life Is Hardly Imitating Art”: Fear May Win Elections, But It Makes Governing Hard
According to Hollywood, most disasters feature government or institutional figures who try to downplay the scale of catastrophe, at least publicly, in order to prevent mass panic. Rightly or wrongly, these fictional leaders want to shield the public from the facts because they believe disseminating the truth would only provoke hysteria.
Right now, though, life is hardly imitating art. As the midterm elections approach, some leading political figures — most of them Republicans — are actively spreading half-truths, distortions and just plain lies in order to increase voter anxiety. They believe exploiting public fears will boost their chances.
It is a sinister and shameful use of the political soapbox, a detrimental exercise that misleads people about the risks they face from threats as different as Islamic jihadists and an exotic virus. It also damages the reputations of institutions that are indispensable in a crisis.
Shouldn’t our political leaders be the responsible ones who distribute facts, dampen panic and model rational decision making? Isn’t it part of their job to coach the rest of us to keep cool? Apparently not, if exaggerating threats is the better campaign strategy.
The use of fear as a political weapon isn’t new, of course. It is as old as the earliest political gatherings and has been used by feudal lords, despots and democratically elected premiers and presidents. There’s a reason for that: Fear is among the most powerful of human emotions, more likely to motivate people to react than sorrow, joy or even anger.
For some Republican candidates, Ebola arrived in the United States just in time. While the murderous jihadists of the Islamic State group had helped to push President Obama’s approval ratings to new lows, they were still a faraway threat. But the tragic death of Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national who died in a Dallas hospital, lent itself to hyperbole and fearmongering.
Several Republicans have found a way to work the Ebola virus into criticisms of their Democratic opponents, usually linking an alleged weakness on border security to an enhanced threat from infected persons. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has suggested that the Obama administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are hiding the truth about the transmission of Ebola.
But the prize may go to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who suggested in an interview with the right-wing media organization Newsmax that Islamic State fighters might use Ebola as a biological weapon.
While the GOP has taken the lead on the fear bandwagon, a few Democrats have also jumped aboard, scared to be left behind. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) are among the Dems who have joined the call for travel bans from some West African countries, although health officials have repeatedly said such restrictions would be counterproductive.
Perhaps our elected leaders would be more responsible if the nation were facing an existential threat, as it did in World War II. Perhaps they’d put aside partisanship if Ebola were really poised to create a worldwide pandemic, spiraling through affluent countries as well as poor ones.
History shows us examples of bipartisan cooperation to fight not only Nazi Germany but also the communist threat that lingered for a half-century after that. Unfortunately, that same history shows us many examples of politicians only too willing to inflame passions, incite fear and create panic for personal gain. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s crazed commie-hunt went on for years, destroying not just livelihoods but also lives.
In my lifetime, politicians have used the fear of racial integration to incite white voters and scare them to the polls. For decades, the worst stereotypes about black students were used to agitate white parents; the most pernicious lies about black homeowners used to panic white neighborhoods. While those segregationist pols didn’t invent racism, they primed it and pandered to it. And we are still trying to recover from the havoc they wrought.
Yes, you can win elections by inspiring fear and panic, unfortunately. But you will have created another breach in the social fabric — another ruinous tear that will make it more difficult to govern from the post you’ve won.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 25, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 