Readers, you know how I like to share my innermost thoughts with you. I have never been one to hold out by concealing from you a profound new insight, raw emotion, an obscure cricket statistic. Still, there are some things a chap doesn't like to disclose. It wouldn't be dignified. The stiff upper lip and the code of my ancestors, the Drebly-Fforsyths.
And yet I am now beyond being able to hide the fact that reading the Guardian is making me distinctly edgy. That splendid organ, spreader of light even unto the most dismal of regions and the voters of Clark County, Ohio, won't stop going on about fear. Not even a month since it terrified readers at their very breakfast tables - different from standard breakfast tables in that they are the site of very breakfasts - with another article by the mellifluous Madeleine Bunting, it today inflicts on us an alarming piece by Adam Curtis. Ordinarily, I am altogether unflappable. I go about life with a serene air and a moderate countenance. I have been known to sing well-known show tunes in order to calm a troubled situation or to settle an overly agitated gathering of hopscotch enthusiasts. But even I - even I, dear readers - have become rattled. I had a nightmare not long ago in which a computer virus menaced me in the most frightening manner and then chewed off a chair leg in the room where I was innocently reading. Fortunately it wasn't my chair, and in any case I woke up.
Adam Curtis, writer and producer of the recent BBC2 series 'The Power of Nightmares', has two theses. This is one of them:
There is a real threat to this country from extreme Islamist terrorism. There is a real possibility of a terrorist attack that will kill and injure many civilians, and so far the security services have worked extremely effectively to prevent this. But the idea that behind this threat is a uniquely powerful organisation with hidden networks of sleeper cells across the world is largely a fantasy. The reality of Islamist terrorism is that it is disparate and complex, driven by an idea and not by an organisation.The 'but' bit of this first thesis isn't altogether reassuring on the fear front, since it merely tells us that the 'real possibility' of which people may be frightened isn't going to come, if it comes, from the sort of entity you thought it was going to come from. Mwahahahaha - you'll be blown to bits by an idea, not by an all-powerful organization. Yikes, now I'm really scared.
But I shall move along to Curtis's second thesis, which is the one that interests me more. It is that because of the loss of hope in progressive politics, politicians have lost the authority they used to enjoy:
Politicians and politics don't give meaning and purpose to our lives any longer, and this has created a crisis of legitimacy for them.So, you see, politicians now rely on fear to beef up their street cred. How does Curtis know this? I don't know how he knows it. He doesn't say. He just tells us that it's what he believes:
This is why I believe that politicians have found in fear a way of restoring their power and authority and recreating a sense of legitimacy.He goes on to say this:
But now it is a frightening future they promise to protect us from. This is largely a fantasy: of course there is the threat of Islamist terrorism, but not from the organised, sinister network they portray.Clank, whirr, bzzzz, gdooing. There's definitely a logical flaw in that last bit, but I'm now skrikking too much to be able to figure out what it is.