Panic attacks: Drawing the thin line between caution and hysteria after September 11.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

ON OCTOBER 7, some police officers in Maryland decided that two trucks on Interstate 270 might be carrying explosives. The alert cops blocked traffic for an hour, searching the vehicles for tools of terror. On examination, the cargo turned out to be stage equipment bound for a memorial service for the firefighters killed on September 11.

A forgivable mistake, given the circumstances? Perhaps.

In Tyler, Texas, a few days earlier, federal agents, city police, and bomb experts from far-flung cities descended on one family's mailbox to grapple with what the local Morning Telegraph described as a "crudely fashioned gadget, which was pieced together with batteries and green duct tape." The streets were blocked; the neighbors were evacuated. The device turned out to be an 8-year-old's homemade flashlight, built as a school project and left in the mailbox for safekeeping.

Still forgivable? Maybe--though on reflection, it doesn't seem likely that the killers who organized the World Trade Center attack would select a neighborhood in East Texas as their next target. But why, after learning that the purported bomb was actually a jerry-rigged flashlight, did the authorities still feel the need to confiscate it?

Since September II, and especially since the anthrax outbreaks that followed, the news has been filled with bomb scares, germ scares, and nervous airlines. Baltimore-Washington International Airport shut down an entire concourse when someone mistook some powdered coffee creamer for anthrax spores; it later shut down a hallway for fear of what proved to be Sheetrock dust. In Nevada, a man called in the police after receiving a suspiciously lumpy package that, when opened, turned out to contain a pair of lace panties and a love letter. An airline bound for Los Angeles was diverted to Shreveport when a man handed a stewardess a note she described as "bizarre" but not actually threatening. ("It didn't make a lot of sense," she said, "but at the same time it was alarming.") Another flight was diverted on its way to New Jersey when some passengers aroused suspicion by speaking a foreign language in the back of the plane. A thorough investigation revealed that the men were two Jews praying.

It's a cautious time, and some of these incidents seem ridiculous only in retrospect. Others simply shouldn't have happened at all. Even the most sympathetic observer will have a hard time defending the airport guards in Philadelphia who nabbed Neil Godfrey before the 22-year-old could board his flight to Phoenix. According to Gwen Shaffer's report in the Philadelphia City Paper, a National Guardsman's suspicions had been aroused because Godfrey was reading a novel--Edward Abbey's Hayduke Lives!--whose cover illustration included some dynamite. United Airlines refused to let Godfrey board his plane, then barred him again when he tried to take a second flight.

Don't assume that such behavior has been limited to the United States. On October 29, the writer Tariq Ali was temporarily detained at Munich Airport when someone noticed he was carrying a volume titled On Suicide. The guard's pique turned to panic when he saw that the book had been written by Karl Marx.

Social Panic

At such moments, panic is indeed the appropriate word: a crushing, contagious fear that prompts people to behave hysterically. The issue isn't whether we're right to be afraid. It's whether we're responding rationally to our perfectly justified fear. The 9/II attacks go so far beyond even their closest precedents that they leave us unsure how to distinguish real threats from the jitters.

The question becomes more pressing when you consider the social dimension of panic. Academics have long discussed the idea of the moral panic, in which fear and hysteria are magnified and distorted--perhaps even create--by social institutions. Though he didn't coin the phrase, the sociologist Stanley Cohen was the first to use it systematically, laying out the requirements for a moral panic in 1972: "A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible." To illustrate...