Stop Calling 'Em Terrorists; It Gives Punks Too Much Power

Calling the bomb-makers and other irritating crazy violent people terrorists gives them too much power.

I'm not terrified, are you?

Millions of Americans go about our lives every day, completely not terrified. We may be concerned, especially when we or a loved one boards an airplane.

We may be irritated, annoyed, exasperated, and fed up with these misguided miscreants.

But let's keep some perspective on this.

Calling them terrorists puffs them up with importance. It creates the impression that they hold one of the most powerful nations in the world in emotional bondage.

It suggests that Americans are sheep who are intimidated by a few crazy yahoos.

Let's stop creating a reality that does not exist and giving them credit they do not deserve.

Call them criminals, punks, severely delusional, sociopaths, psychopaths, and -- for the suicide bombers who are underage -- juvenile delinquents.

Believing one is a terrorist may be attractive to some people. Being called international scum, probably not.

Communication and psychology researchers have known for some decades that language constitutes in some part our reality. See, for example, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Journalists, wise up. Choose the words you use to describe renegade bomb-makers wisely. Diminish them; don't build them up.

I'm not terrified. Are you?

Attack of the Killer Barbie Dolls Turns Mass Media Reporting to Mush

I was not terribly surprised yesterday this overwrought headline arrived on my desktop: Killer Storm Faye Barrels Toward Florida.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti reported “numerous deaths,” according to the Agence France-Press report.

That just shows the usual fuzzy thinking about cause-effect relations that characterizes the Ken and Barbie approach to news reporting. The Dominican Republic and Haiti are two of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Whenever it rains hard, people are washed away in mud slides. They live marginal lives in huts cobbled together from corrugated metal, clinging to the least desirable pieces of real estate on mountainsides.

A more accurate headline would read: Homicidally Indifferent Government Causes Yet More Deaths.

Or perhaps: Extreme Poverty Takes More Desperate Lives.

Perfectly groomed Barbie and Ken reporters are not able to think too deeply about social forces. They are able, however, to recognize a really big wind and a lot of rain.

Any sort of weather emergency quickly exhausts their tiny vocabularies. Cause and effect reasoning is largely beyond their mental processes.

The Barbie dolls have killed good reporting as it used to exist when I first started out in journalism, so long ago that I pounded out my copy on ancient, high carriage typewriters -- in triplicate. It's all mush now. Social forces are the same as rain. A tropical depression with high winds and rain is a killer storm. I'm not sure what they'll do with the next hurricane. It will be apocalypse now, I suppose, in their oh-so-limited views of life and the world. Can we please have some grown-up reporters once in a while? Please?

Culture of Fear

I remember when thunder storms came, and people got out of the rain. Now, thunder storms are a national emergency, with warnings from the National Weather Service streaming across the television screen. People state that the weather is worse now than it used to be, but I expect that’s not the case.

Not so many years ago, an Associated Press wire report about eight people dead in a tornado in Alabama would have been buried on a back page of the New York Times in a few paragraphs. Many local newspapers wouldn’t have had space to run such a report. Now the 24/7 news cycle places cameras at the scene within minutes.

Yesterday, eight children died in a school in Enterprise, AL, in just such a weather event. But it’s not Armageddon, and we don’t need to cling to our radios in desperate fear of the weather. Scared populations trade freedom for the illusion of security.

Authoritarian leaders have no need to impose dictatorship on the U.S. people. All they have to do is give them Ipods and plasma televisions and keep them hypnotized by streaming disaster news and amused by escapist programs with lots of whoo-hoo screaming. Then, the sheep gladly trade liberty for the prison of safety.