Time to Panic

One of the things I remember from my days as a summer-camp counselor was a skit in one of our campfire entertainments, in which someone runs onto the “stage” shouting “The Viper! The Viper is coming!” Then someone else comes screaming, “The Viper! Oh, No! It’s The Viper!” followed by a third, echoing “The Viper! The Viper is nearly here!” Then at last an ordinary workman appears, carrying a large cleaning-rag, and says, with a marked accent, “I’m the Viper. Vot do you vant me to vipe?”

To my mind, an episode of this kind is emblematic of the way fear builds on fear, and a minor misunderstanding can snowball into a major panic. Modern psychologists have given this phenomenon the sobriquet of “mass hysteria.” Give people something to be afraid of, and they will, so to speak, jump at the opportunity. Movie makers are of course well aware of the possibilities here. Alfred Hitchcock probably caused millions of people, especially women, to be afraid of being knifed when taking a shower (Psycho) or even to feel uneasy when in the presence of such generally harmless creatures as birds (The Birds).

Times of war and crisis are particularly fertile fields for breeding false fears. At the beginning of World War II, one of the things people in England most feared was poison gas. (I well remember, at the age of five, being issued my own gas mask, months before the war actually began.) Far into the war, people habitually carried their gas masks with them. As it turned out, of all the horrors Hitler inflicted on his enemies during that terrible conflict – and of course not counting the millions murdered with gas in special “camps” – poison gas was not one he used. This may have been because of his own memories as a German soldier, of being gassed in battle during World War I.

In the United States, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provoked a whole wave of false fears of attack and invasion, especially on the West Coast, leading to the notorious internment of thousands of innocent residents of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizens. In point of fact, the number of actual attacks by Japan on the American mainland during the entire war was ludicrously small, and none could in any way be called successful – except perhaps in provoking further panic. One involved the shelling of an oil installation near Santa Barbara, from a Japanese submarine. Another – undoubtedly the most dramatic – made use of the “jet stream” winds to carry incendiary and explosive “balloon bombs” across the ocean. The only known human fatalities resulting from this enterprise were six members of an Oregon family who in May 1945 came upon one of these devices where it had fallen days earlier in some woods, and somehow triggered it.

Three decades earlier, the peacetime sinking of the “Titanic,” and all the resulting publicity emanating from a story of incomparable human interest – a gigantic ocean liner, on her maiden voyage, sunk by an iceberg, with heavy loss of life, partly due to insufficient lifeboats – generated fears which have persisted to this day. Despite the mass of “safety” legislation which resulted from this disaster, and especially with alternative air travel now available, there are, no doubt, many people who, with “Titanic” replays in various media still in mind, would never consider any form of ocean travel, even though nearly all passengers today are on “pleasure cruises” with no particular destination planned and the greatest danger on such vessels seems to be not from external threats, but from the spreading of disease aboard.

Modern psychologists, who have condensed every human failing into some neat formula, now characterize any manifestation of excessive fear as a “panic attack,” and they have batteries of techniques and medications for dealing with such troubles. But what about when a whole segment of society has a panic attack? The Stock Market is famous for losing its cool, and occasionally going crazy. Sports fans are similarly subject to extreme nervous tension, especially when national prestige is involved. Religious enthusiasm may transmute itself into armies of crusaders going off to rescue supposed “Holy Lands.” And all modern manifestations of “Rock and Roll” may be seen as some kind of cultural panic attack.

Rumors are the classic vehicle for the planting of panic. So let me caution you to keep a skeptical ear open when you next hear a warning that “The Viper is coming!”