*May 6, 2007*

*The Ministry of Fear*

*By Harry T. Cook*

**

A recent family wedding required air travel, and in the process I became reacquainted with the fear factor being deliberately induced in the national psyche to garner support for the much-touted ‘war on terrorism.’

There I was with my wife, a son and my mother-in-law queued up with hundreds of travel-weary Americans trying to juggle boarding passes, IDs, one-quart maximum clear plastic bags carrying shampoo, deodorants, etc., shoes and metallic objects – all the while being urged by an impatient voice piped over a static-filled P.A. system to ‘keep moving.’

A frail dowager who must have had a knee or hip replacement was being thoroughly frisked with a beeping, blinking wand as the officer made sidelong wise cracks to a fellow worker about ‘this sucky job.’

The trouble is not, in fact, the inconvenience of it all. You can find inconvenience aplenty in such venues as crowded ballparks and sports arenas, cashier lanes in supermarkets and waiting rooms in doctors’ offices.

What is trying about the inconvenience of airport security is its banality: Not particularly well-paid persons half-heartedly poking through other peoples’ belongings, hearing but apparently not listening to the incessant beep of metal detectors buzzing and flashing about somebody’s loose change.

One can understand that, at some level, the procedure is intended for the safety of the flying public. And, certainly, it’s a good idea to keep loaded firearms, live grenades and switchblades off aircraft. But is it too cynical to connect that procedure to the Bush administration’s /modus operandi /of maintaining a level of fear sufficient, at least in the minds of its political strategists, to recruit cheerleaders for the U.S. military presence in Iraq?

George W. Bush and his handlers, against the expressed will of the electorate, continue to prosecute a war against a diffuse enemy in Iraq on the lame pretense that it is doing so to prevent terrorists from swimming ashore on Cape Cod and Long Island in a remake of ‘The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.’

Nothing reminds people more of the box cutters of 9/11 than a shoeless walk through airport security, pockets turned out while watching cell phones and laptops disappear behind the curtain. And that is so obviously part of the psychology of fear.

Why else would Bush and his Republican cohort want to pay as low a wage as possible to those supposedly on the front lines of homeland security and, at the same time, deny them the sophisticated (and available)

apparatus that is actually able to perform effective searches with as little inconvenience as possible to the traveling public?

Face it: It is the fear deliberately engendered and maintained largely on the cheap that is considered, even by this lame duck president and his people, to be a politically effective strategy. They must know that a vial of poison in a city’s water supply or a body bomb detonated in the stands at a major league ball game or something so simple as car bomb in a mall parking lot – or merely the threat of them – are the terrorists’ weapons of choice. Such terrorists likely would be homegrown or legal transplants as in the late Seung-Hui Cho.

If Bush really believed he could hold terrorists at bay by destroying what’s left of Iraq, he would be asking for sacrifice – for reinstitution of the military draft to raise a very large army, or for serious gas conservation to enable this country to free itself from the shackles of Middle Eastern oil and get our soldiers the hell out of there.

Meanwhile, the Bushies want you to be vewy, vewy afwaid as they go about hunting wabbits. They want to reinforce that fear by requiring my 79-year-old mother-in-law to remove her shoes and display her various medicines to public view just to be able to occupy a seat in the sardine section of an airplane where she can buy a bag of stale chips for $2 and rent a blanket for $2 more.

It is no wonder that the Bush people are doing everything in their power to kill off Amtrak. There’s no security inconvenience in waiting for the morning train and riding it in comfort across the hills and plains of the American countryside. The only fear is that the ride will be so inconvenience-free that one might fall blissfully asleep and miss the call for dinner in the diner.

I’m a lot more concerned that born-in-the U.S.A. terrorists will blow up poorly guarded gasoline depots or nuclear power plants or shoot up another university campus with firearms (which are about as available in most states as a Big Mac with super-sized fries) than I am about anybody’s septuagenarian mother-in-law trying to smuggle aboard a DC-9 two teaspoons’ worth of nitroglycerin in her eau de cologne bottle.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.