Culture of fear extends reach, yields profit

This past weekend was Halloween, and everybody was talking about its origins and purpose, just like they do every year. Some think of Halloween as an opportunity to try on a new identity for a night. Some think of it as an opportunity to try on something slutty for a night. I think it’s really interesting that a holiday exists, at all, which we have totally dedicated (at least in name) to scaring ourselves. Think about it: Why does America drop everything to watch horror movies and go to haunted houses and buy witch decorations at Walgreens that cackle at you when you walk by?

Well, Halloween is over now, and we can all get back to scaring ourselves more creatively. What scares me? The apocalypse, and also, therefore, talking about global warming. It is one of the most odious topics a person can raise in conversation. Any slight mention of it in front of the wrong person, and suddenly a massive conversation involving guilt, fear and mass extinction is unleashed. That is not to say that I don’t think the problem is real. And I like Earth. I’ll buy all-natural Clorox products and stuff. I’m down with being green. But I am going to stop doing it if being environmentally-conscious means always having to talk about our imminent death and being told it’s my fault.

You know who does want to talk about our imminent death? Hollywood. America. Probably you. Turn on TLC and watch a show about a face-eating tumor. Go to a movie any day of the year and see films such as “Knowing,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “I Am Legend,” “The Road” and the soon-to-be-released film “2012.” This is all evidence that somebody out there thinks our fear is a goldmine. I don’t know, maybe you guys enjoy them, but I always leave the theater after one of those movies thinking about how much time I will have wasted studying and appeasing people I don’t respect, all to get flattened by a meteor, apparently in a couple of years.

I realize that the end of times has been a human obsession since the dawn of time, but I’m beginning to feel like our culture is becoming defined by fear, and not just the haunted house kind. If it isn’t rising sea levels, it’s epidemics, nuclear bombs and so on. I’m starting to get angry. It seems there is a huge profit to be made by the powers that be, simply by convincing us to offer ourselves sacrificially to a juggernaut of negativity. There seems to be a collective effort to wrest from us a sense of control over our own fates and make us run amok, crazed by a nameless fear. But some fears have names, and that’s why I am angry.

I was inspired to write this column, not by Halloween, but by recent news. The Weather Channel has, for more than 25 years, been a repetitive but reliable source for news about the most pertinent issue in our lives: the weather. Now, according to the Weather Channel’s press release from Oct. 20, they will begin showing feature-length films on Friday nights, to “further demonstrate how weather is an all-encompassing part of our lives that entertains and inspires us,” or, in other words, to boost their ratings. Anything to avoid giving us weather news.

True, you can get weather on your iPhone now, so maybe we don’t really need round-the-clock weather coverage. But, after all, we are living in the age of “An Inconvenient Truth.” In real life, the scariest effects of global warming are manifested in the weather. And that, in turn, scares me, because I start thinking about tornadoes. I, like many others, have lain in a bathtub with my little sister, clutching a couch cushion on top of our heads, as a tornado passed over the house and thought, “This is it for us.” And I think about hurricanes. There are people along the Gulf Coast who endured nights of Hurricane Katrina’s roaring winds and emerged to see the dead bodies of neighbors floating past their homes. That is real fear.

So, Weather Channel, what’s so wrong with a little information, a little reassurance, even if it’s boring? Maybe this is the natural progression of your network, as a business, but all I can think about are those times, right before the power went out in our house, when I heard a Weather Channel anchor’s voice on the TV in the other room and felt a little less isolated and scared. I’m sad that you, TWC, are joining the rest in choosing revenue over responsibility. Now, when we turn on the Weather Channel, we will get sensationalized movies about mostly fictional natural disasters, not news we can use to prepare for disasters that could actually happen to us. Maybe the concept of “real people” providing useful information, in real time, has become antiquated. However, in this culture of fear, a channel that could tell me, in a calm human voice, exactly which enemy to fear and which way it was headed, was a rare resource, and I think America will be sad to see it go. Lame, Weather Channel. Lame.

—Robbie Wright is a senior in English literature. She can be reached at rwrigh24@utk.edu.