John Strausbaugh Fear Itself
Note: This is an excerpt from Sissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps and Stoopits, published by Virgin Books USA in 2007.
The Cold War conditioned us to live in a constant state of fear and anxiety, to worry all the time about some "threat" or "attack," to be on "alert" for enemies foreign or "homegrown." For a good three decades we were told we were threatened with mutual assured destruction — MAD, one of the all-time great acronyms.
By the time the daily threat of nuclear annihilation faded into the background, we'd become such Sissies, so used to feeling threatened all the time, that we began to fill in with a long list of other "threats" to worry or panic about. Many of them played on our Sissy dread of disease and our own mortality — not to mention our fear of direct contact with others — by scaring us with threats of some kind of infection. In 1976, the Centers for Disease Control threw the entire nation into a mass panic about swine flu, after a single soldier at Fort Dix died of it. President Gerald Ford, dutifully citing the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 — a real epidemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including more than half a million Americans — declared that every man, woman and child in the United States must be inoculated immediately. Millions of dollars' worth of vaccine was hastily prepared and rushed out, and worried Sissies stood in long lines to get their shots.
Fifty million Americans had been inoculated when the program was abruptly halted, because it turned out that the vaccine had caused paralysis in a number of people, killing some of them. Swine flu didn't kill and maim them. Sissy panic did. In fact, the only American who died of swine flu that year was that poor soldier. A deluge of lawsuits rained down on the CDC, the director was forced to resign, and the agency's reputation was severely damaged.
You might think that such a colossal embarrassment would make the CDC and other health agencies a little more cautious about rushing to judgment on nonexistent epidemics in the future. Instead, just the opposite happened. It's like they're in a race to find a new disease and then run to the TV cameras to shriek at us Sissies about it. Desperate to prove their value as our vigilant defenders against disease, health agencies scour the globe to find any evidence of a new possible epidemic they can announce to the world, scare us all about, and then miraculously defeat. Our heroes! Thank you for defending us from… what was it again? Chinese Chicken Flu?
In the '80s it was, of course, AIDS, and the CDC and all media screaming at us that we were all gonna die. Not just the specific populations the epidemic seemed to be targeting, but all of us. We went to bed having a Sexual Revolution and woke up to see WAR IS OVER-size headlines shouting SEX = DEATH. People were terrified not only of sex, but of touching anyone who might be gay or "infected." Going to or working in a hospital was a death sentence, and forget about going to the dentist. Using a public rest room was suddenly not merely a mildly distasteful experience, but lethal. Daily newspapers ran front-page charts predicting the rapid spread of the epidemic. They looked like Apple's stock chart after the debut of the iPod. As late as 1988, the respected sex researchers Masters and Johnson were still warning of an impending heterosexual AIDS epidemic in their book with the classically Sissy scare-title Crisis. If AIDS had spread the way they all shrieked at us it would, there would have been no American Sissies left alive to panic about Y2K at the millennium.
Remember Ebola? No, you probably don't. The appearance of this virus in Central Africa in 1994 was trumpeted as another great plague that would sweep the planet; bestselling books and even a movie helped spread the panic. Ebola abruptly dropped out of the media after killing all of 244 people, all of them in Central Africa. Those deaths were sad, but they didn't add up to a world plague. And they were nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who died that year of dysentery, TB and other diseases that are too common and boring to write books and movies about.
After the 9/11 attacks traumatized the nation, we might have looked to the government and media to calm our fears. Instead, they went into overdrive to make us more fearful and keep us in a state of high anxiety.
Starting just one week after 9/11, a handful of envelopes filled with anthrax spores were mailed to a few politicians, TV stations and newspaper offices. Many more envelopes filled with harmless white powders were sent as malicious hoaxes to other political and media outlets, including the paper where I was the editor. Our receptionist opened the envelope and nearly had a heart attack. Someone called 911. Guys in full HAZMAT gear arrived to seal our office, look through our mail, and totally disrupt business.
The anthrax panic made Sissies around the country afraid to open their phone bill or shake their postal worker's hand. When the fog of terror passed in a couple of months, it turned out that a whopping twenty-two people had been infected, and five died.
After anthrax, American Sissies were afraid to go out of their homes in the summer of 2002 for fear of being bitten by a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus. By the end of the summer, only six hundred cases of West Nile fever had been reported nationwide, with thirty-one fatalities. That was sad, but it wasn't an epidemic worthy of mass panic. There were roughly eighty gun fatalities in America every day during the same period.
That fall, we were told to forget the mosquitoes and panic instead about smallpox, a disease we all thought had been eradicated in the 1940s. Close to 40,000 Americans were vaccinated against it — and then the program was stopped when it was found that the vaccine was causing inflammation of the heart in some recipients. As of 2007, there have still been no cases of smallpox in America since the 1940s.
Despite the fact that neither anthrax nor smallpox nor any other biological or chemical weapons "threat" had been shown to be anything but theoretical, in 2004 Congress approved the Bush administration's Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion program "to purchase and stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox and other potential agents of bioterror." Over ten years, the government would amass a mighty Strategic National Stockpile of these vaccines and drugs. In 2006, The New York Times reported that Project BioShield was way behind schedule, as government agencies dithered over which drugs to buy, causing major drug companies to give the whole program a pass. That left the field wide open for "relatively small outfits with limited experience. VaxGen, for example, had never taken a drug to market. Its first major product, an AIDS vaccine, flopped in 2003." The company was dropped by NASDAQ in 2004 for "accounting errors."
God, I feel so much safer knowing that.
Remember SARS? In 2003, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was the new next global plague. It also never happened. SARS caused somewhere around eight hundred fatalities worldwide. Malaria kills more people every three hours. No American died of SARS.
The next year came bird flu. Officials estimated in 2004 that as many as 400,000 Americans could be infected. International travel was curtailed to prevent people from tracking bird flu from one nation to another. Chickens were slaughtered in great numbers.
This time, it wasn't just government bureaucrats ratcheting up the fear. People opposed to the government seized on bird flu as a handy weapon to pummel George Bush with. Running for president, John Kerry accused the Bush administration of not doing enough to develop and stockpile the required vaccine to save America from the coming epidemic. Ralph Nader added his dire warnings that "The Big One," as he called it, was imminent. Liberal journalist Mike Davis wrote a whole book about our government's lack of preparedness for the coming apocalypse, called The Monster at Our Door.
As of August 2006, the World Health Organization estimated that a total of 138 people had died worldwide from bird flu. That's 399,862 fewer than the predictions for the U.S. alone. What percentage is 138 out of the 6.6 billion people on this planet? My calculator can't do the math.
But I don't need the calculator to know that this was no Great Influenza Pandemic.
I don't know that you'd want to draw any direct parallel, but it is awfully interesting that a similar panic about infection helped motivate Germans to isolate and exterminate 6 million Jews in the 1930s and 40s. Jews were literally thought to be a public health problem. It was said that Jews, by their very presence, spread typhus and other contagious diseases. Schoolkids were marched through exhibitions that compared Jews to rats, lice and germs. Removing Jews from the healthy German body politic and then eradicating them was seen, James M. Glass writes in "Life Unworthy of Life", as "a problem in sanitation management."
Think about that: the Holocaust as a public health scare. Jews, the SARS of the 1930s. A panic whipped up not just by Goebbels' loony Nazi propaganda machine, but also by supposedly sane, humane German health care workers and medical scientists.
I always knew the Nazis were Sissies. You can tell from their outfits.
By the time the daily threat of nuclear annihilation faded into the background, we'd become such Sissies, so used to feeling threatened all the time, that we began to fill in with a long list of other "threats" to worry or panic about. Many of them played on our Sissy dread of disease and our own mortality — not to mention our fear of direct contact with others — by scaring us with threats of some kind of infection. In 1976, the Centers for Disease Control threw the entire nation into a mass panic about swine flu, after a single soldier at Fort Dix died of it. President Gerald Ford, dutifully citing the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 — a real epidemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including more than half a million Americans — declared that every man, woman and child in the United States must be inoculated immediately. Millions of dollars' worth of vaccine was hastily prepared and rushed out, and worried Sissies stood in long lines to get their shots.
Fifty million Americans had been inoculated when the program was abruptly halted, because it turned out that the vaccine had caused paralysis in a number of people, killing some of them. Swine flu didn't kill and maim them. Sissy panic did. In fact, the only American who died of swine flu that year was that poor soldier. A deluge of lawsuits rained down on the CDC, the director was forced to resign, and the agency's reputation was severely damaged.
You might think that such a colossal embarrassment would make the CDC and other health agencies a little more cautious about rushing to judgment on nonexistent epidemics in the future. Instead, just the opposite happened. It's like they're in a race to find a new disease and then run to the TV cameras to shriek at us Sissies about it. Desperate to prove their value as our vigilant defenders against disease, health agencies scour the globe to find any evidence of a new possible epidemic they can announce to the world, scare us all about, and then miraculously defeat. Our heroes! Thank you for defending us from… what was it again? Chinese Chicken Flu?
In the '80s it was, of course, AIDS, and the CDC and all media screaming at us that we were all gonna die. Not just the specific populations the epidemic seemed to be targeting, but all of us. We went to bed having a Sexual Revolution and woke up to see WAR IS OVER-size headlines shouting SEX = DEATH. People were terrified not only of sex, but of touching anyone who might be gay or "infected." Going to or working in a hospital was a death sentence, and forget about going to the dentist. Using a public rest room was suddenly not merely a mildly distasteful experience, but lethal. Daily newspapers ran front-page charts predicting the rapid spread of the epidemic. They looked like Apple's stock chart after the debut of the iPod. As late as 1988, the respected sex researchers Masters and Johnson were still warning of an impending heterosexual AIDS epidemic in their book with the classically Sissy scare-title Crisis. If AIDS had spread the way they all shrieked at us it would, there would have been no American Sissies left alive to panic about Y2K at the millennium.
Remember Ebola? No, you probably don't. The appearance of this virus in Central Africa in 1994 was trumpeted as another great plague that would sweep the planet; bestselling books and even a movie helped spread the panic. Ebola abruptly dropped out of the media after killing all of 244 people, all of them in Central Africa. Those deaths were sad, but they didn't add up to a world plague. And they were nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who died that year of dysentery, TB and other diseases that are too common and boring to write books and movies about.
After the 9/11 attacks traumatized the nation, we might have looked to the government and media to calm our fears. Instead, they went into overdrive to make us more fearful and keep us in a state of high anxiety.
Starting just one week after 9/11, a handful of envelopes filled with anthrax spores were mailed to a few politicians, TV stations and newspaper offices. Many more envelopes filled with harmless white powders were sent as malicious hoaxes to other political and media outlets, including the paper where I was the editor. Our receptionist opened the envelope and nearly had a heart attack. Someone called 911. Guys in full HAZMAT gear arrived to seal our office, look through our mail, and totally disrupt business.
The anthrax panic made Sissies around the country afraid to open their phone bill or shake their postal worker's hand. When the fog of terror passed in a couple of months, it turned out that a whopping twenty-two people had been infected, and five died.
After anthrax, American Sissies were afraid to go out of their homes in the summer of 2002 for fear of being bitten by a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus. By the end of the summer, only six hundred cases of West Nile fever had been reported nationwide, with thirty-one fatalities. That was sad, but it wasn't an epidemic worthy of mass panic. There were roughly eighty gun fatalities in America every day during the same period.
That fall, we were told to forget the mosquitoes and panic instead about smallpox, a disease we all thought had been eradicated in the 1940s. Close to 40,000 Americans were vaccinated against it — and then the program was stopped when it was found that the vaccine was causing inflammation of the heart in some recipients. As of 2007, there have still been no cases of smallpox in America since the 1940s.
Despite the fact that neither anthrax nor smallpox nor any other biological or chemical weapons "threat" had been shown to be anything but theoretical, in 2004 Congress approved the Bush administration's Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion program "to purchase and stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox and other potential agents of bioterror." Over ten years, the government would amass a mighty Strategic National Stockpile of these vaccines and drugs. In 2006, The New York Times reported that Project BioShield was way behind schedule, as government agencies dithered over which drugs to buy, causing major drug companies to give the whole program a pass. That left the field wide open for "relatively small outfits with limited experience. VaxGen, for example, had never taken a drug to market. Its first major product, an AIDS vaccine, flopped in 2003." The company was dropped by NASDAQ in 2004 for "accounting errors."
God, I feel so much safer knowing that.
Remember SARS? In 2003, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was the new next global plague. It also never happened. SARS caused somewhere around eight hundred fatalities worldwide. Malaria kills more people every three hours. No American died of SARS.
The next year came bird flu. Officials estimated in 2004 that as many as 400,000 Americans could be infected. International travel was curtailed to prevent people from tracking bird flu from one nation to another. Chickens were slaughtered in great numbers.
This time, it wasn't just government bureaucrats ratcheting up the fear. People opposed to the government seized on bird flu as a handy weapon to pummel George Bush with. Running for president, John Kerry accused the Bush administration of not doing enough to develop and stockpile the required vaccine to save America from the coming epidemic. Ralph Nader added his dire warnings that "The Big One," as he called it, was imminent. Liberal journalist Mike Davis wrote a whole book about our government's lack of preparedness for the coming apocalypse, called The Monster at Our Door.
As of August 2006, the World Health Organization estimated that a total of 138 people had died worldwide from bird flu. That's 399,862 fewer than the predictions for the U.S. alone. What percentage is 138 out of the 6.6 billion people on this planet? My calculator can't do the math.
But I don't need the calculator to know that this was no Great Influenza Pandemic.
I don't know that you'd want to draw any direct parallel, but it is awfully interesting that a similar panic about infection helped motivate Germans to isolate and exterminate 6 million Jews in the 1930s and 40s. Jews were literally thought to be a public health problem. It was said that Jews, by their very presence, spread typhus and other contagious diseases. Schoolkids were marched through exhibitions that compared Jews to rats, lice and germs. Removing Jews from the healthy German body politic and then eradicating them was seen, James M. Glass writes in "Life Unworthy of Life", as "a problem in sanitation management."
Think about that: the Holocaust as a public health scare. Jews, the SARS of the 1930s. A panic whipped up not just by Goebbels' loony Nazi propaganda machine, but also by supposedly sane, humane German health care workers and medical scientists.
I always knew the Nazis were Sissies. You can tell from their outfits.
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Comments (2)
Fear is right
That was about the best laid out collection of all the scares we have undergone. I think sometimes, we don't feel right unless we're scared of something out there. It's become such a natural thing. And now we have HPV and Swine Flu. It would be interesting to take a look at the money that is generated, each time another of these fear tactics are drummed up and the populace is whipped into another heady froth.
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June 12, 2009
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Fear of WHAT?!
Excellent article, particularly in light of yet another flying pigs virus having conveniently morphed into a pandemic, which will be a golden harvest for vaccine and drug makers. The US government recently made 1 billion dollars available for these genocidal exercises. Novartis leads the herd with $289 million in federal support, followed by Sanofi Aventis with $191 million and GlaxoSmithKline with $181 million. In addition, the US government de-risked the vaccine production,meaning these Mengele clones can't even be held liable when their experimental witchbrew concoctions kill or maim people for life. In particular, Novartis' new cell-based vaccine caught my attention in this context and I was wondering whether it was OPTAFLU, cultured on the kidney cells of a dead Spaniel (no kidding!), which will also be a major scoop for the multi-billion dollar HIV/AIDS industry, since it may give false-positive HIV results
in serology tests using the ELISA method to detect antibodies against HIV-1, Hepatatis C and HTLV-1, which may be due to the IgM response to the
vaccine. See my article "OPTAFLU - look at the timeline" by Ingrid Blank
http://www.healthy-humans.co.za/optaflu.html
What a brilliant idea to inflate HIV statistics and push toxic antiretroviral drugs on healthy people, which no doubt happens on a
daily basis in South Africa where 60 other diseases prevalent in Africa in
addition to flu and pregnancy would also give a false-positive
reading.
http://www.emea.europa.eu/humandocs/PDFs/EPAR/optaflu/H-758-PI-en.pdf
In this context read:
[http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/smart_hiv_dumb.html]
Reprinted from Credence Publications November 25, 2000,
http://www.creedence.org
Smart HIV Test is Dumb After All
By Steven Ransom
in serology tests using the ELISA method to detect antibodies against HIV-1, Hepatatis C and HTLV-1, which may be due to the IgM response to the
vaccine. See my article "OPTAFLU - look at the timeline" by Ingrid Blank
http://www.healthy-humans.co.za/optaflu.html
What a brilliant idea to inflate HIV statistics and push toxic antiretroviral drugs on healthy people, which no doubt happens on a
daily basis in South Africa where 60 other diseases prevalent in Africa in
addition to flu and pregnancy would also give a false-positive
reading.
http://www.emea.europa.eu/humandocs/PDFs/EPAR/optaflu/H-758-PI-en.pdf
In this context read:
[http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/smart_hiv_dumb.html]
Reprinted from Credence Publications November 25, 2000,
http://www.creedence.org
Smart HIV Test is Dumb After All
By Steven Ransom
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June 24, 2009
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