Wonder Land

October 26, 2001
Wonder Land
Ghost Buster: America
Finds a Worthy Worry
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Finally, after 30 years of public phobias, America has anthrax -- something worth being afraid of. Alas, what's also spreading fast is the sense that the government isn't doing a very good job of handling it. But how would they know? This country's presumably serious people have spent so many years building towering infernos of hysteria, panic, litigation and political demagogy out of this or that presumed threat to public health that it's little wonder the system barely knows how to deal with something real.

Lawn chemicals, nuclear power, food additives, fluoridated water, high-tension wires, implanted silicon, cancer clusters, agricultural pesticides, the ozone layer, allergies, microwaves, vaccines, bioengineered foods -- how did a sophisticated, well-educated people manage to let itself be frightened by modern life itself?

I have sometimes felt that living in America now must be a little like what it was to live in a medieval village on the edge of the Black Forest in the 12th century. Daily life flourished with belief in hobgoblins and other unseen threats -- all brought to life by word of mouth and rumor. The great medieval rite of Halloween arrives next week, and some American towns and shopping malls have decided to ban it to protect the local children from weaponized anthrax.

Wonder Land


It's hard to blame them. Even local pols know the price they pay for not overreacting now to the merest whiff of danger. Many watched the bonfires of hysteria that went up around the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1973, or the chemicals long buried at Love Canal in upstate New York. If you want to update and universalize the timeline of modern American phobias, follow the yellow-brick road that led to the bottled-water boom: What comes out of the tap passes first through a chemical bath to purify the water of dangerous bacteria; ergo, it could hurt you, so it's better to drink water that flows through some medieval cow pasture in the French Alps.

Amid this history, the irony is that the anthrax story is being handled rather well. Television and especially the print media have tried hard to tell what is known about the science of anthrax and the murky world of weapons derived from biology. Public officials, attempting to balance a heavy burden of partial knowledge and potentially grand-scale distress, haven't been perfect, but they haven't been grandstanding either.

I think it's worth trying to explain the soberness surrounding anthrax as against the hysteria that attended a Three Mile Island, because indulging these phobias really has cost us something in foregone benefits from useful technologies. Had anthrax-like standards of balance and proportionality been applied to the provenly minor incident at Three Mile Island, a clean, efficient nuclear power industry might have developed in this country. Food irradiation is an exhaustively examined, safe process that would save us from all manner of sickening food-borne germs such as E. coli in hamburger, chicken and such, but the successful propagation of mindless fears keeps it out of supermarkets.

The compulsion to scare ourselves began around 1965, with the publication of Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" about the hapless Chevrolet Corvair. Ralph's good luck was to find willing partners in the local press, which rewrote this and other pedantic studies done by earnest young lawyers into melodramatic tales of corporate malfeasance. The fact that Mr. Nader's famous Raiders were lawyers should have been a red flag even then: A lawyer's job is to arrange a set of facts to argue only one side of a case.

It was bad enough when reporters threw over ancient traditions of balance to hype Ralph's obsessions with auto and food safety, but the real meltdown of the public's emotions began after TV discovered the benefits of promoting public-health fears. Put it this way: If local TV news had existed in the 12th century, it would have sounded like this: "Bill, News 9 has learned there may be an old woman living in the woods just behind me who is baking children in her oven. We'll have interviews with two survivors, Hansel and Gretel, live at 11." Cars that roll over or burst into flame, killer pajamas, killer baby rattles, killer hot dogs -- scary stories, or at least one side of each story, became a constant on TV news.

I think this floodtide of fright in the media the past 30 years had two basic origins, both absent from the anthrax story. The first is plaintiffs lawyers. Many of the killer-product stories were pulled from one side's legal brief in product-liability suits built on contingency fees. Giving airtime to lawyers for both sides would produce indeterminate, even boring, television. The public price? Everyone now knows that mass death from anthrax or smallpox is worse than any vaccine's low risk, but lawsuits have virtually destroyed our vaccine infrastructure.

But there has also been a national political dimension to the one-sidedness, notably with environmental frights. The Love Canal buried-chemical scare built support for passage of the complex Superfund law. Pesticide scares were about banning pesticides, such as DDT. We can argue the merits, and even concede a real problem in some instances. The larger reality is that most reconstructions of these incidents show that politics and litigation simply crushed real science.

The anthrax story is coming through cleanly because there is no one to sue so far and because none of the primary players -- in the media or in politics -- has a preexisting agenda attached. We have defaulted to playing it straight. And what that means is that just this once, for all the initial stumbling around, we may be able to keep the phony frights at bay and find our way to the right solution to a real problem.


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