What Would Bogey Do?

Responses to "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?"

Round 2 (posted September 11, 2006)

by James Fallows

James Fallows is National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq.

In the first round of posts the participants all disagreed somewhat with one another and with John Mueller. If the discussion went on at greater length, I'm sure we would place slightly different emphases on the urgency of the challenges the United States has to deal with and the next steps it should take. But when compared with the general sweep of public, political, and media portrayals of the ongoing threat of terrorist attack, all of us, along with Mueller, are essentially on the same side. Everyone here has agreed that politicians have routinely made the threat seem more dire and immediate than it is and that the media have generally played along.

Why should this be? Why, of all the cultures that have had to deal with terrorist attacks over the last decade, should the United States now seem most fearful?

It would be easiest, if most depressing, if one could simply conclude that this is how Americans are. But in fact, Americans have historically prized just the opposite sort of demeanor: people who keep their cool and refuse to be rattled, even under stress.

This is the country that produced Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart. When he was able to speak after being shot, the first thing Ronald Reagan said was not: "Let's lock down much of Washington to keep this from happening ever again." He said, of course, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Even those who didn't think Reagan spoke for their politics thought he spoke for their culture. And Rudolph Giuliani's God-like status in the few months after 9/11 was based largely on his calm, concerned, but non-panicky sense of competence.

I think a better explanation involves two forms of market failure, one involving politicians and the other the media. The political market failure is that over the last five years, it has been far more effective for politicians to appeal to sky-is-falling fears than to try to calm them. The Republicans have been the greater offenders, because they have been in office, because this plays into their traditional strength on national security, and because it suits the nature of a President who feels he found his historic mission on 9/11 and a Vice President who portrays the world in the direst of terms. But Democrats have often tried to counter by being even more alarmist, emphasizing hidden weak points Republicans have not yet addressed.

The media market failure is more obvious. For reasons that predate 9/11 and that distort public discussion in ways that go far beyond terrorism, the media have made it hard to think calmly about the threat and the proper response. Here the greatest offenders are the 24-hour news channels, because of the all-or-nothing nature of their business model. The audience for cable news soars when there is a crisis, and it is thus in these channels' interest to turn everything into a crisis. A war will serve, but if there isn't one at the moment, whatever is at hand will have to do.

Thus a missing Washington intern, Chandra Levy, received national-emergency treatment in the weeks before 9/11, and was essentially never heard of afterwards. And thus the young woman missing in Aruba has served as a place-holder emergency between the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of al-Zarqawi. In this system, it is almost impossible for TV not to overplay any hint of a security threat.

The problems I have described are structural, but I suspect the answer will depend on individual political leadership. When someone can actually play the role of a Churchill -- or a Gary Cooper, or even a Rick Blaine at his bar in Casablanca -- Americans will be able to be themselves again.