Word: paranoia
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Terrorism is warfare by intimidation, by the creation of paranoia. The devilishly clever design involving Flight 800, if indeed it was premeditated, was to lob one over America's back fence while her people were all in the front room, gathered around the TV watching the Olympics. It was on Atlanta that most of America's security apparatus was focused. All the more ironic, perhaps, that this fixation grew out of an attack 24 years ago in Munich, when Palestinian terrorists shocked the world by kidnapping and killing more than a dozen members of the Israeli Olympic team right...
...travelers are flying to Atlanta, their internal dissonance is unsettling. The bright celebration of the Olympic Games will be dimmed by a sticky coating of paranoia. We went through this atmosphere before, in the '70s, and we remember Munich...
...dreams of such results. Any one of those suitcases on the conveyor belt is the seedpod of our death. The furniture really does conceal monsters. Each rental truck is an apocalypse idling at the curb. Each 747 takes on some unsettling metaphysic of Jonah-eating whale, or Moby Dick. Paranoia renders nature and its objects darkly volitional, satanic. The intent of terrorism, we know, is to break down the boundaries and sane categories of the mind and to make everyone start thinking like a psychotic...
...Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind...
...when you're horny, beat up a rival trying to make time with your estranged girlfriend. Beware the cable guy bearing gifts. Indeed, beware anyone emerging out of the hostile anonymity of modern city life who is too anxious to assuage your anomie. If bitter experience has taught our paranoia anything, it's that excesses of accommodation are all too often aggression's most winsome disguise...