By Chaim Bertman

ON SEPT. 11, 2001, I was awakened early by an old friend's voice on my answering machine. "Chaim, are you awake? I know you can hear this. Get out of bed. Turn on the radio. Bad things are happening. Planes are falling out of the sky. Buildings are blowing up. It's really, really bad." There was a long pause, and then "I love you."

The way she spoke those last three words sent a shiver down my spine. From her apocalyptic tone, I assumed it was nuclear war. Interestingly, the adrenaline didn't immediately surge through my system. Groggy, strangely calm, I pulled at my blinds, peeked outside: blue skies over San Francisco. I knew this might be the biggest day of my life. I might have to make terrible decisions, enormous sacrifices. I knew I needed a little more sleep.

Three minutes later, I got out of bed, turned on the radio. Another friend called. "Are you listening to all of this? These sons of bitches are going to declare martial law. This is what they've been dreaming of ... " Though I didn't completely doubt this ghastly scenario, for some reason, I didn't feel afraid.

Strange. I'd had hundreds of crazy phobias in my life: elevators, spiders, throat cancer, tidal waves. But in the months to come, as our entire nation was whipped into a froth over the events of 9/11, I never once felt any fear in my body, the pounding heart, the sweating palms, the wild eyes. Then again, I made a decision that grim morning not to watch any television coverage of the attack. I already knew that it was "real," and I didn't want the sickening images to enter my nervous system, because it didn't seem healthy, and because I didn't want to be emotionally manipulated by the opportunists in Washington, D.C.

The interesting thing about not watching television when others were was that most people came across as slightly robotic, repeating a handful of catchphrases as if they were universal truths. Taken out of the delicate ecosystem of television, most of these phrases sounded vague and meaningless and obviously coercive – "We're all in this together" – and some downright sinister: "We have to stand behind the president."

Anyone who still fails to see the correlation between fear and power should probably read Barry Glassner's book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, whose primary aim is to make Americans more savvy about the people pulling on our strings. This cogent, penetrating book is already a bit quaint: it was written in the gentle days before Sept. 11, when all we had to fear were our addictions to guns, tobacco, oil, a vast electrical grid, fear itself, corn syrup, and drunk driving – which is to say, artificial stimulants.

"Why are so many fears in the air," the book begins, "and so many of them unfounded?"

Throughout the book Glassner shows how Americans are deluged with anxiety-provoking statistics and yet, in general, remain distressingly unsophisticated in interpreting them. In our obsession with crime, for example, we misgauge the magnitude of the problem: as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, two-thirds of Americans believed they were soaring. Likewise, we make false, often insulting, assumptions about the perpetrators: "Adult Americans," Glassner writes, "estimate that people under eighteen commit about half of all violent crimes when the actual number is 13 percent."

Systematically analyzing the things Americans consider grave – killer kids, mutant microbes, unwed mothers, crack, breast implants, minorities, plane crashes, and road rage – Glassner shows how politicians, advocacy groups, people with chips on their shoulders, quacks, outraged moralists, and infotainment peddlers "manipulate our perceptions and profit from our anxieties." He suggests not that we have nothing to fear, but rather that we must learn to distinguish an anomaly from a trend, an advocate from an expert from an idiot, and to be vigilant in considering who might benefit from the perception that there's a crisis, or that a given thing is the root of that crisis. His meditation on the American psyche, as measured by the weighing of its nervous preoccupations, will be shocking for as long as Americans give themselves to fear, as he suggests, with so little irony, so little circumspection, so little sense of how they're being manipulated – and, although he refrains from saying outright, with so little courage.

As new fears emerge, each begging for money, outrage, or legislation, it isn't always a simple matter to discern who or what is behind them. As in trying to explain the tulip craze in 18th-century Holland, one is often left with all the ambiguities of cultural psychology. For example, as Glassner points out, with the glut of talk shows and news articles about road rage, one would hardly know that one is 65 times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than by an enraged driver. Although Glassner speculates a bit about the psychological dimensions of such scares (cultural anxieties, radical changes in family life, a hunger for moral certainty leading to a desire for unambiguous villains and unblemished victims, an all-too-human impulse to shift blame on those who have no advocates), the strength and originality of the book are in his scrupulous presentation of the data and the clarity with which he exposes the orchestrators of a panic.

Ultimately, however, Glassner doesn't quite manage to persuade us that ours is, per se, a culture of fear – certainly not the kind of fear Kierkegaard spoke of in his dreary meditation on Christianity, The Sickness unto Death. One wonders if ours isn't, more precisely, a culture of free-floating anxiety; a slightly morbid infotainment culture, given to easy answers, addicted to comfort and afraid of losing it; a consumer culture that condones, even enjoys, a level of glibness and mendacity, and savors the way our media magnify and prey on psychological imbalance.

As Glassner convincingly explains, fear sells, but perhaps a little of that mercenary instinct, however subconsciously, went into the title and content of his own book. One could equally make the case that ours isn't so much a fearful or anxious culture as an intellectually passive culture, the evidence being that we're manipulated as easily by envy, greed, sloth, lust, and vanity as by fear. Or that we're, for the sake of argument, a soft, unanchored, childish, reactive, harsh, puritanical, troubled, neurotic, hungry nation obsessed with crime, disease, and gore and not, from a spiritual perspective, the greatest nation on earth.

Understandably, Glassner prefers to keep to the facts and rigorously avoids such tenuous and mean-spirited speculation. Still, it's interesting that he frames the problem as first and foremost American. Certainly, we aren't the only society to be manipulated by fear-slingers, to feel the sting of Machiavelli's observation that to retain power, it's better to be feared than loved. It would take a different kind of book from Glassner's to illuminate how our fear has a uniquely American face. Such a book, I imagine, would have to examine America's fearfulness in all its economic, spiritual, and historical dimensions, as a deep problem of national karma – and ultimately, as a reflection of our own inimitable, slapped-together consciousness.

After all, who would be so bold as to imagine that genocide, slavery, the barbarism at Salem, Jim Crow, and the reluctance to give women the right to vote are all the products of impulses so ancient they no longer have any power over us? If we never acknowledge, deep down, that what we did is part of who we are, what will make the past stop looming large on us?

To understand this problem of national karma, however, one doesn't have to defer to ancient history: the current political order is suitably unsettling. As Noam Chomsky points out in his recent book Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews, the American attack on Nicaragua in the early 1980s led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and it's easy to imagine what America's response would have been had Nicaragua killed so many of us. Yet even most intellectuals on the left in America are deeply resistant to the premise that the same standards should be applied to us; no one, for example, takes seriously the logic that Washington should be bombed for X, Y, or Z. Chomsky's analysis, to my mind, suggests that at least some of America's condition is the nervousness of a nation that lives in glass towers yet retains the heavy-handed international policy of throwing stones.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, perhaps we fan our obsession with unfounded fears, in part, to distract ourselves from, or inoculate ourselves against, those paralyzing fears that have their basis in reality. Even as we sit before our TV sets in regal comfort, deep down we must know we live on the same globe as Hitler, Stalin, Leopold did; in an age of machine guns, depleted uranium, Hiroshima, Nagasaki; in a time when corporate leaders, on the average, make hundreds of times as much as their employees and only a fool can fail to see the specter of selfishness and greed that hovers over all the earth. What's more, as Mary Shelley illustrated so well in Frankenstein, humankind now lives under the increasingly gloomy shadow of its astonishing scientific accomplishments – gloomy not for any fault of our creations, but rather because we sense that we ourselves are unfinished as a species, restless, suspicious, and unkind, and probably not ready for bronze daggers, let alone weapons that kill from the sky.

Instead of falling into pessimism, a healthier response to fear, no doubt, is to face these profound problems of our age as a spiritual challenge. This is ultimately a much more radical activity. What Glassner is describing is a kind of national hypochondria. As such, it represents a form of spiritual bondage to which a seasoned response can only be made by snarking TV and looking inward. After all, if it's a mad country, one has to let oneself be out of step with it.

While Glassner's book, as an exercise in reason, debunks our unfounded fears and leaves us to ponder the cultural anxieties they unwittingly broadcast, the paranoid literature of Philip K. Dick magnifies those anxieties, drawing them to their grotesque conclusion. As Glassner is a potent antidote to fear, and Dick is afraid of his clock radio, I would strongly recommend reading these authors back to back.

Although by many standards Dick's patchwork masterpiece, Ubik, may be written off as 200 confused pages of hack drivel, the novel is an epiphany-soaked laundry list of themes that haunt modernity. Dick, of course, is a literary southpaw: his swing often looks silly, and he often misses his target, yet, somehow, he debunks our unfounded certainty about our sanity, about our world. Ubik's plot, as it exhaustively sweeps the contours of the author's jangled nervous system, can't really be paraphrased, just loosely cataloged; as with many intricate allegories, the outline is the heart of the vision:

Near future. Mutations emerge among human beings: a handful have telepathy, a handful can see future. Evil corporations hire these "talents" as spies. Benign corporation, though in it mostly for the money, uses newer mutations, "anti-talents," to thwart these talents, clean up infiltrated work sites, et cetera. But it's a losing battle.

Enter Joe Chip. Good guy, luckless, lonely, in debt, exhausted with life. Chip hates modern world, where everything is for sale: talking door won't let him leave his own apartment without a nickel, calls him a deadbeat. You'd hardly know Chip's the world's best damned analyst-coordinator of anti-talent. Enter Pat: sexy, petulant, unkind. Pat has an astonishing new anti-talent: she can alter future by altering past. Chip senses trouble. Doesn't trust how deeply she alters reality. Nonetheless, Chip includes her in anti-talent team for important assignment on space colony. Bomb goes off, kills Chip's boss, who is that rare bird: a good CEO. Chip and 11 others flee.

Back on Earth, something is drastically wrong. Material objects are aging rapidly: fresh cigarettes crumble in his fingertips; overnight, Wendy, one of the best anti-talents, grays, withers, dies. Weirder yet, CEO's face begins to appear on North American currency. At this point in the book, American advertising culture takes center stage. Ominously, a new household product, Ubik, short for "ubiquitous," begins to appear regularly on billboards, TV, even in Chip's dreams. This wonder product claims ability to be able to stop reality from the dual corruptions of premature aging and proliferation of dead CEO's face. Chip suspects Pat is behind this altered reality. It turns out she's actually Jory, an evil brain kept alive in a "moratorium" in Zurich!

Chip finally understands the truth: he and 11 anti-talents actually died in space. The cesspool he had considered modernity is a crass illusion best explained by Dick's philosophical-schizophrenic axiom, "Reality is that which doesn't go away even when I stop believing in it." Every moratorium, it turns out, has a bad egg like Jory, who controls other brains, creates our grotesque imaginary worlds. The actual world, outside, is doing fine – just as it was before the mission, when Chip was a luckless, lonely guy.

Although I wouldn't want to be Dick, he remains my favorite amphetamine addict. His allegory of modernity as a gnostic hell realm has the rare therapeutic power of a deep dream – of a worst-case scenario. Couched in the flimsy absurdity of bad sci-fi and the garbage culture of American advertising, Dick somehow opens our minds and inspires us to consider his deepest theme: who is human and who only masquerades as human? The reader, afterward, feels vividly awake, while other people suddenly look like cows in a pasture, dull-eyed, chewing on grass.

But even if a novel like Ubik could dissolve some of our fears of a post-human Earth – even some of Glassner's American fears – still, it seems to me, the wisdom of the Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, would stand: the human nervous system is such that we must eventually look inside ourselves to see what gives birth to our own most personal fears.

Without theorizing his fears away, or bringing them to life in a fictional world, Michael Bernard Loggins, author of Fears of Your Life, cuts away the middleman and simply numbers his fears. There's something refreshingly joyful in this approach; by numbering fear, Loggins shows how Fear is composed of many small fears. He takes away their long shadows and makes fear finite.

Written in a lively, lucid, meticulous hand, Fears of Your Life is reminiscent of early Matt Groening, not only in spirit and subject matter but in style. The author's graceful drawings of fearful things – a spider, a time bomb, a kitchen knife, a bat with a human face, a woman screaming – have a light touch and a humor that runs throughout the book. (Since 1984, Loggins has been making art at Creativity Explored, a San Francisco nonprofit visual arts center for adults with developmental disabilities. A warm and outgoing person, he can often be found at Adobe Books in the Mission District, where he is one of the many resident philosophers.) While Groening's Life in Hell comics copped the naïve but knowing voice of an observant, unindoctrinated child trapped in an insane, unfair adult world, Loggins, an adult with developmental disabilities, manages to convey his candid and telling observations about modern America without losing his own voice:

Part One, Things that you are very Fearful OF: 1. Fear of Hospitals and Needles. 32. Oakland fears. 33. San Francisco fears. 47. Fear that the television will explode if you turn it on. 98. People are fearful of me which I wonder is they think that I'm all that terrible or I'm thinking that they think I'm not Human at all Because when they sit next to me than they get back up and move away from me I may be a stranger But that doesn't make me a monster or something like that. People aren't Humans they act like ignorance Dogs with their tail in back of their legs or in Between their middle Bodies their legs. they don't think who's Feelings they hurt at all they just do it No consideration for whatever ...

Part Two, What fears can do to you ... Fear #37 Grabbing onto someone else's grandmother which you thought she were yours And you haven't ever thought that Those Grandmother's that you haven't seen that has passaway From what your parents has told you that your Grandparents Has passaway Before you were Born is scary and Fearful situation to be in. Yes, it can happen by accident.

As Loggins takes us through the dismal side of human experience, one remembers how cathartic, warm, spell-binding, and liberating negativity can be. For people absorbed in their fears, this handsome, seemingly effortless book should become apparent for what it is, the meditation of a sensitive spirit with a humility that sees, names – and thereby melts – our coldest fears.

"I write down my fears," Loggins explains, "my scariness and my frightfulness. It helps me focus on what's bothering me, on what's making me uptight, what's making me feel like less of a man. This is an understanding process. It helps me real good."

Although Loggins seldom makes universal statements about the modern condition, reading his quiet, everyday fears jolts us into seeing how deeply many of us have fallen into our grander national anxieties. As our (appointed) leader's "preemptive" war rages across the shrinking globe and a fishy breeze blows through Washington, whispering tyranny, paysy-backsiness, malaise, and there's very much to fear, more than ever we should be asking ourselves why we are so afraid and how, as a people, we can pull ourselves up from slavery to our fear.

To both of these questions, I would suggest a classical answer: that a mature culture requires conscious cultivation not of a single trait, such as courage, self-knowledge, or savvy, but rather a balance of virtues: a harmony that can arise only after studying our Achilles' heel, however unpleasant. From Glassner, we gather that Americans must not only learn how to read statistics but cultivate a hard-headed attitude toward fear itself and learn to say, "You're gonna have to try harder than that to prove it to me." On top of that, it might deepen us to sustain the tough spirit of Black Elk, who, though and because he loved life, was able to give up even his most precious possession and say, "Today is a good day to die." This toughness, however, might become a monstrous thing if not balanced with the curiosity and patience we see in Loggins, the courage to explore, admit, and voice one's fears. Since much of fear has its roots in a bad conscience, and since a nation, like a person, must eventually atone for its mistakes, liberate its demons, and begin again, I would also suggest that, instead of simply pointing fingers, we all should deeply consider these words: "I too am American, slave and slave master, Indian, killer of Indians." Finally, as life is never perfect, a smattering of resignation wouldn't hurt, the ability to say, at the end of the day, in the words of Dick, "If you think this world is bad, you should see some of the others."

Chaim Bertman (chaimbertman@yahoo.com) is a critic and the author of the novel Stand-up Tragedian (Creative Arts). He lives in San Francisco.

ART, PLEASE BOX:

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things

By Barry Glassner. Basic Books, 304 pages, $15.95 (paper).

Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews

By Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press, 144 pages, $11.95 (paper).

Ubik

By Philip K. Dick. Vintage, 224 pages, $12 (paper).

Fears of Your Life