Paranoia self-destroy ya’

Sometimes when I eye America from this vast distance I get the sneaky feeling that everyone over there is completely crazy. They’re indulging in an orgy of paranoia; the Y2K thing came and went, so now the nation is biting its collective nails in fear of the great biological terrorist attack.

According to an AP story on the subject, “Such an attack is expected in this country within the decade,” says D.A. Henderson, who is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.

Of course, if such an attack wasn’t “expected,” then his Center for blah-blah-blah wouldn’t be necessary, would it?

Well, I don’t expect such an attack. I’m not saying it can’t happen, I’m just saying I don’t EXPECT it to happen. Nobody I know expects some apocalyptic germ terror. So who is “expecting” this germ attack?

Well, Henderson and a lot of others, seemingly. Reams of articles are coming down the pike about America’s “vulnerability” to bioterrorism. Even the Economist magazine did a piece on it. But I’ve never heard of a single case of any actual bioterrorism.

We’ve jumped from theoretical possibility to presumed inevitability. That’s quite a leap.

But raving paranoids are good at making such leaps. Indeed, I don’t think Americans will sleep soundly at night until they’ve all got government surveillance cameras installed in their homes, everyone over the age of 24 months old is peeing in bottles every week, and Big Brother himself supplants good old George W’s visage on the dollar bill.

Society is scared of its own shadow, and needs to cozy up to an authoritarian figure to calm it.

Don’t ask me how things got that way–I don’t know. Human nature, I guess. The great American experiment in freedom and liberty was a historical aberration, one that was bound to be pulled down by the entropy of mob stupidity. Most people don’t want “freedom,” they want to be told what to do. Some people get downright angry when they hear such a statement, but, to paraphrase Shakespear, they doth protest too much, methinks.

The bioterrorism bandwagon will roll along until the next Big Scare comes along, and then the next one, and then the next one. The “experts” will all warn us about the “threat.” Where’d all the Y2K “experts” go?

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Paranoia is probably a profitable industry. Maybe we should design and market a Home Germ Warfare Survival kit, in which we re-label all those Y2K survival provisions. I’ll have the boys in the R&D department get to work on the Home Asteroid Smacking into Earth Survival kit, too.

Sometimes the utter complacency of the Commonwealth irritates me, but if the alternative is mass paranoia, I’ll count my blessings.

Now if you’ll excuse me I just got a fruitcake in the mail from somebody named Bin Laden…must be a late Christmas present…hey, it tastes pretty good….