Fear in a handful of dust

By ARTHUR SPIEGELMAN

LOS ANGELES - Airliners make emergency stops or are kept on the ground for the strangest of reasons - a man accidentally spills confetti from a greeting card, or two orthodox Jews go to the back to pray in a suspicious foreign tongue - Hebrew.

Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler, provokes a press storm by deciding to keep news of his public appearances secret, and Time magazine jokes that Vice-President Dick Cheney has become so hard to find that he must be in the witness protection programme.

Meanwhile, police and fire departments buzz from one tall building to another, from "sea to shining sea", to check reports of mysterious white powder that might be the potential germ warfare agent anthrax ... or powdered sugar or biscuit crumbs.

Disneyland, "the happiest place on earth", will not let you in until it has checked your bags for guns, bombs and bullets.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust," the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote.

Thousands of Americans are doing it on their own in what some are calling a national nervous breakdown.

The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and discoveries of anthrax at NBC in New York and at a tabloid newspaper chain in Boca Raton, Florida, have turned ordinary life into a minefield. Anything from a newspaper, to a letter without a return address, to a restaurant buffet table might be fraught with danger, harbouring invisible killers.

Company mailrooms have been transformed into "hot zones" in which clerks don face masks and rubber gloves to pick up the mail with tweezers and the Post Office flags suspicious envelopes by pasting pink stickers on them.

Disinfectant sales are booming and internet sites are hawking Cipro - an anthrax-fighting antibiotic - with all the fanfare previously reserved for Viagra sales.

FBI offices are swamped with calls about suspicious mail. The head of the FBI's Dallas field office said his agents responded close to 200 times in three days to calls about suspicious letters or packages that turned out to be harmless.

"We are coming to the point where about an hour ago we had a woman call in because she has the flu. She called her doctor's office and they referred her to the FBI."

A Delta Air Lines flight was diverted to Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday after passengers mistook prayers said by two Orthodox Jews on board as a threat.

Flight 458 landed at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, and passengers were taken off while officials investigated a report of two "Middle Eastern men" creating a disturbance on board.

The airport manager said: "Everybody is kind of on edge, and it just doesn't take much to upset a lot of people."

A woman in Walnut Creek, near San Francisco, hesitated to take delivery of a rug because the deliverymen looked too swarthy. Workers at a Manhattan office refused to pick up copies of the Wall Street Journal because they did not recognise the deliveryman.

Practical jokers and the mentally unstable are ratcheting up overtime for overtaxed emergency workers.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a group of young women returned to their hotel room to find white powder on the bedsheets. It turned out to be coffee creamer and sugar.

"It was meant to be a practical joke," said Plymouth's fire captain.

Meanwhile, at the Portland, Maine, post office where two powder-filled envelopes burst open in as many days, people were relieved to discover the powder was baking soda. Apparently, a mentally ill woman had mailed the letters.

University of Southern California sociology professor Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, a book about fear in modern-day America, said: "While I would not call it a national nervous breakdown, many people are more afraid than they need to be. There's a big distinction between danger to the country and danger to the individual. The average person is more likely to die from an auto accident than from an anthrax attack."

But he added: "We can no longer believe, as we always have, that we cannot be attacked on our own shores, and that changes our overall sense of individual and collective security."

- REUTERS

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