Economist / Shell Writing Prize 2002

Milksop Nation

By Jack GordonI like thunderstorms. My dog does not.I never feel so impressed by planet Earth, nor so satisfied to inhabit it, as when a properthunderstorm is in progress. I like the rumbling approach of the great cumulus cloud, the boomsand flashes, the way you can actually feel the air pressure drop in the moments just before thefirst wallop of wind arrives. I like storms even though one tried to kill me a few years ago, late atnight on a 36-foot sloop with its full mainsail still stupidly up, 20 miles from the nearest shore of Lake Superior.No thunderstorm ever offered my dog any harm, but they terrify her just the same. Shewhimpers and shivers. She hides in the bathroom. She crawls into people’s laps. She makes aninsufferable nuisance of herself, and no reassurance can calm her. Call Roxie neurotic, but she just doesn’t feel safe.Then again, if “neurotic” refers to behaviour dictated by a fear that is unreasonable by prevailingsocial norms, then perhaps the word no longer applies. When the TV weather people inMinnesota, where we both live, interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to issuepanicky bulletins concerning a thunderstorm detected (by Doppler radar) somewhere within150 miles (but headed this way!), they always speak as if addressing viewers no better able thanRoxie to assess the odds against being eaten by thunder or struck by lightning.Blowing threats out of proportion is, of course, the stock in trade of TV news, whether themenace in question is a summer rainstorm or the distressing stains revealed when aninvestigative reporter shines ultraviolet light on a freshly laundered bed sheet at an upscalehotel. But television reflects its viewers’ attitudes as well as shaping them, and clearly thereexists a very large audience receptive to the never-ending theme: Life is meant, ever and always,to be safe—and you’re not safe.Enter Osama bin Laden.Twelve hours hadn’t passed since the first airliner struck the World Trade Centre onSeptember 11th 2001 before the talking heads on CNN turned their attention to the subject of how much freedom Americans would be willing to give up in order to feel more secure. Ievidently missed the explanation of how they came to see this as the first and most obviousquestion written in the flames still rising from the rubble in lower Manhattan. As suddenly as theplanes that had slammed into the twin towers that morning, the issue simply materialized in thevestments of the story’s anointed spin.At the time, it seemed bizarre. I had spent most of the day watching the footage of those sameflames, and not once had it occurred to me that a logical response to the horror might be tosacrifice my freedom.

Sure enough, though, the newsies had it right. It was as if the USA Patriot Act signed into law byPresident Bush six weeks later (and denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union as “basedon the faulty assumption that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties”) were alreadydrafted and ready on the morning of September 11th, awaiting only one final push from thelobbyists at al Qaeda.In retrospect, it’s hardly startling that the pundits—and the Congress—pounced so quickly onthe idea of trading freedom for safety. Nor should it come as any surprise that the Americanpublic (80% of it, according to this summer’s opinion polls) would so readily accept theexchange as a sensible one, even when the freedoms to be surrendered are unspecified andwhen the explanations of why eliminating them will guarantee anyone’s security are notforthcoming. The TV weather people have us pegged. What Americans demand above all fromtheir government, from their weather—from life itself—is that they be made to feel safe.For two decades and counting, we citizens of the land of the free and the home of the bravehave happily traded freedom for every scrap of bogus safety dangled before us. Indeed, we havedevoted prodigious energy to

inventing

threats that demand the sacrifice of liberty, privacy andeven basic human dignity.It hardly takes an international cabal of murderous fanatics to frighten us into making the trade.This is a country in which millions of working people submit routinely to random inspections of their own urine. Why? So that someone, somewhere, can feel falsely assured that no insuranceclaim is processed and no forklift in the nation is driven down a warehouse aisle by a weekendmarijuana smoker. The act of contributing the sample must be observed by monitors to preventthe wondrous crime of urine fraud—a transgression unimaginable before the 1980s, when weobliged Ronald and Nancy Reagan by opening our bladders to public scrutiny in the name of workplace safety.From the other end of the political spectrum come the pusillanimous speech codes on ourcollege campuses. These restrict permissible discussion so that tomorrow’s thought leaders mayfeel safe. Safe from what? From chance encounters with thoughts that might disturb theirequanimity.We know perfectly well—television tells us so—that half of humanity lives in appalling povertyand that common pastimes on three continents include fleeing marauding bandit-armies andwondering where one’s next meal will come from. Yet here in America, the threat du jour—ourown pet idea of a deadly menace to our health and welfare—is secondhand smoke. We’re notonly able but eager to take this seriously, ordinances and all. In the entire state of Californiathere is no saloon with a clientele so reckless and depraved that the law will avert its eyes andpermit them to take the insane risk of drinking a beer in a building occupied by a person whomight smoke a cigarette.Contemporary vacationers will be scandalized to learn that in Frank Sinatra’s heyday, divingboards were standard equipment at the swimming pools of the glittering hotels on the Las VegasStrip. Even three-metre-high boards! The curse was lifted, thanks to a well-grounded fear of personal-injury lawyers, and the Strip today is proudly board-free. After all, someone might gethurt. Against that prospect, who would argue for the freedom to attempt a back flip in thegambling capital of the world?We’d sacrifice the right to choose what foods to put in our mouths if only the dieticians wouldsettle long enough on which ones are safest for the bills to be pushed through our state

legislatures. Sugar or Saccharine? Margarine or butter? Wine or abstinence? Meat or no? Thereare germs on our kitchen counters that appear under ultraviolet light!