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Night vision
The Net reflects and amplifies our dark fears about terrorism
by Dan KennedyIt's nighttime on the Net. It's always nighttime on the Net. The random, chaotic jumble of information, the flatness that makes a well-designed Web site devoted to, say, paranoid conspiracy theories look just as credible as the New York Times, are a perfect analogue for the way your mind works when you're having a nightmare.
Which is why cyberspace is such a useful metaphor for terrorism -- for the passive, random, chaotic victimization we all feel when a pipe bomb explodes at the Olympics, or when a jet plane blows up over Long Island, or when buildings filled with Americans implode in Manhattan, or Oklahoma City, or Riyadh.
There's something about the Net that allowed it to capture the sheer nightmarishness of the weekend's events in Atlanta better than any newspaper, better than any TV station. It's not that newspapers and television did a bad job; actually, the coverage I saw was quite good. But the job of reporters and editors is to bring order out of chaos, and there is no order.
Rather than reading and watching journalists as they tried to explain what it all meant, I found myself playing over and over a short video of the explosion that I'd downloaded. Shot by an amateur named Robert Gee, who was standing far from the stage of Centennial Olympic Park, it begins with a few seconds of revelry, followed by a loud, bright explosion on the left-hand side of the frame, almost out of view. A man says "Whoa!", as though he had just witnessed a particularly impressive fireworks display. That's followed by several moments of confusion, and then by people starting to stream out of the park.
There's no running, no panic, not much screaming. These people are so far from the action that they obviously have no idea of what just occurred, only that it was something bad and that they should get away. The entire dark, flickering sequence lasts less than a minute.
The Net can provide you with a weird empowerment in the shadow of your powerlessness. It's like you get to choose how you will be tortured. CNN's Web site (www.cnn.com) had a section of scenes from the Atlanta bombing: thumbnail-size photos that you could enlarge by clicking on them. When horror confronts you on TV, you needn't do anything but watch. Indeed, to avoid the horror requires a deliberate act: a reach for the remote, either to change the channel or to turn the damn thing off. But what do you do on the Web when you see a tiny photo of blood-stained pavement? Do you zoom in? Or do you move on? We often accuse TV news operations of voyeurism. The Net raises uncomfortable questions about our own voyeurism.
Random-access terror parallels our national sense of victimhood, our conviction that we have no control over our lives, something that pervades every aspect of our psyche in 1996.
The New York Times may win a Pulitzer next year for its exhaustive documentation of an economic trend -- middle-class downsizing -- that, statistically speaking, is no more prevalent now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Downsizing reflects our anxieties so perfectly that it almost has to exist. Go to work, get pink-slipped. Next thing you know, you're working in an information booth on the highway at a fraction of your old salary, and your wife and kids have left you.
Step on a plane, get blown up.
In politics, we must choose between a president we don't trust and a challenger we don't like. The only real possibility of change comes in the form of a strange little billionaire who scares the hell out of us. The only people who speak to our deepest fears -- that technological change, promoted by a shadowy elite that doesn't care about us, will rob us of our humanity -- are Pat Buchanan and the Unabomber. The former foments hatred of minorities, of immigrants, of lesbians and gay men, all the while sipping chardonnay and commenting on the carpeting at Ritz Carlton hotels. The latter blows people up to get our attention. He not only addresses what we're afraid of, he is what we're afraid of.
We can see our powerlessness reflected in pop culture, too. The cuddly hopefulness of E.T. has given way to the terror of Independence Day. Bart Simpson, a take-charge kind of guy, is eclipsed by Beavis and Butt-head, buffeted by events they can neither control nor understand. In kids' TV, the witty Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is passé, having yielded to the non-linear appeal of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (I defy anyone over the age of 30 to watch an episode of Power Rangers and then describe what happened.)
I kept clicking and jumping around the Net. Following reports that US militias were under suspicion,
I jacked into the Usenet group alt.politics.white-power, and came across a message that had been posted a few days before the Atlanta bombing. It began: "I'm really pissed off about the Olympics. Far too many niggers and other minority group people are participating for this to be the type of wholesome, healthy competition it was intended to be." I got to alt.politics.white-power through a link from the Stormfront Web page (204.181.176.4/stormfront), "a resource for those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture . . ." The page also includes a link to Pat Buchanan's Web site (www.buchanan.org). Not that Buchanan sought the Stormfront endorsement. But this is, after all, the Web. Push on one spot, and everything else vibrates to your touch. How much of a devolution is it from Buchanan to Stormfront to demented militiamen making pipe bombs to fight back against the New World Order? (Or, possibly, a security guard with a twisted need for attention?) About the same, I suspect, as it is from Rush Limbaugh to Bob Grant to Gordon Liddy to Mark from Michigan to Timothy McVeigh."Don't you find it peculiar that there is a G-7 meeting, along with Russia scheduled next week to discuss implementation of various things to counter terrorism," begins a posting to alt.conspiracy. "Note that this meeting was scheduled prior to the downing of the TWA flight or the pipe bomb at the Olympics. Don't you also find it peculiar that the OKC bombing took place right when Congress was earnestly considering tossing out the restrictions on the so-called assault weapons and also the anti-Terrorism legislation that was to be voted on."
Perhaps the most sensible weekend commentary I encountered was by the Boston Globe's David Shribman, who wrote on Sunday of "the perception, though probably not the reality, that the nation is not secure."
But Shribman's words fail to resonate, because perception is reality. Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times on Sunday, captured the real meaning (that is, the real meaninglessness) of modern terrorism.
"All he needs is a bomb in the right place -- the Internet, 500 cable channels, MSNBC, CNN and Sky Television will do the rest, carrying his deed to every corner of the globe in real time," Friedman wrote. "Never have more people been more fully informed, and more deeply rattled, by someone they cannot identify and for causes they don't know."
And in the face of such abject meaningless, people will attempt to find meaning. "Anyone who believes the bombing wasn't planned, or orchestrated by the shadow government is very naive," wrote another poster to alt.conspiracy. "When those in control want something to happen, it happens. Public opinion is massaged and manufactured. The feds are snuffing a lot of pawns lately, and it's probably going to get worse."
It's nighttime in America.
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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/