Busy Night

In _The Culture Of Fear_ author Barry Glassner argues that it is our
*perception* of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk.
It is an interesting read of how organizations that manipulate our
perceptions profit from our fears. The profit in the instant case is
public opinion. It might be submitted that so long as we can be made to
fear an "imminent threat", terrors of the imagination will remain united
with the terrors of truth, indecipherable to the public, producing the
desired efficacy of minimalizing public examination of the organization
itself.

Compound this manipulation of American fear of terror post-9/11 with war
and you've got the ingredients for shaping public opinion in a way that
most benefits the Administration. As Walter Lippman noted in 1922,
public opinion tends to solidify during times of war and the media,
becoming more patriotic, aids in this solidification.

The real question for the American people should be whether or not, in
the face of the radical transformation of their privacy rights and their
acceptance of the general war on terror as justification for their
support of unilateral invasions conducted under the guise of rather
nefarious rationales, the Administration has created an environment for
them that is realistically safer from terror now than it was prior to
9/11.