IN THE LINE OF FEAR
The sniper terror has not brought out the best in the American character,
says Christopher Caldwell
Washington. DC IN the suburbs of Washington these days, you can see men zigzagging across supermarket parking lots, making herky-jerky Irish-jig hops. You can see women squatting indecorously next to their cars while filling up at petrol stations. These are only the more embarrassing precautions my fellow citizens have taken against the mysterious sniper who, since the beginning of October, has shot 13 people and killed ten.
At just the moment when Washington is proposing to lead the world into war against a homicidal potentate in Iraq, the killings have left the nation's capital cowering under its collective bed. Across a vast metropolitan area that spans parts of four states and holds five million people, virtually all public activities have been halted: the Verizon music festival; grade-school field trips to rural Maryland; SAT testing, on which students' college admissions hinge; all soccer games at every level; the Gaithersburg Oktoberfest: the whole high-school football season; various flea markets and charity fairs; the Rockville ten-kilometre run: and Hallowe'en parades everywhere. School 'crisis counsellors' are mobbed. There have been hospitalisations for stress. An errand service in Bethesda, Maryland, reports dozens of new clients, who have hired the firm to fetch petrol for them. You could almost forget that, since this terrorism episode started, two dozen people have died in what the Washington Post now refers to as 'traditional' homicides.
Those of us who detected a change in American psychology after 11 September turn out to have been wrong. We are not behaving with the pluck of Israelis, as one might have hoped: we are not even behaving like Londoners during the Blitz. About the only consolation for Washingtonians is that the wider nation has, if anything, outdone us in its jitters. When the sniper shot a man in Ashton, Virginia, 108 miles south of the first cluster of attacks, the mayor of nearby Richmond responded by shutting down the 141,000-student public-school system indefinitely. Meanwhile, the 'Battle of the Bands., which draws tens of thousands of spectators and thousands of musicians to Washington DC's historically black Howard University
each October, fizzled out when 23 of the marching bands cancelled their visits. Howard, as it happens, is located at the edge of a neighbourhood that is one of the Western world's homicide havens. The sniper has shot exactly one person within the Washington city limits.
Who is to blame for the climate of fear? Certainly, Charles Moose, police chief of Montgomery Co. (Maryland), who had jurisdiction over the first handful of killings, has mystified the public. Moose is both omnipresent and incomprehensible. After the first killings, Moose pulled the unheardof feat of hitting the talk shows on all four major networks on a single Sunday morning — all without imparting a single scrap of information that could either enlighten or console. At a press conference after the Virginia shooting, he said cryptically, 'You gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you provided.' When confused reporters asked for a clarification. Moose's spokesmen told them to just shut up and report it — the sniper would understand.
So the press. in Moose's mind, has the task not of informing the public but of serving as messenger-boy for his decidedly cinematic emotional entanglement with the sniper. After the shooting of a 13-yearold kid at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, Moose sobbed. 'All of our victims have been innocent, have been defenceless. But now we are stepping over the line because our children do not deserve this.' Great men in desperate times have traditionally sought counsel from their culture's storehouse of literary wisdom, so it was hardly surprising that
Moose should cite Jaws IV.The Revenge (1987): 'This,' he said, 'is getting to be really, really personal now.'
One would beg to differ. Now is when it ought to be getting really, really professional. But Moose has captured the zeitgeist. At a deep level, he does not know he is not in a movie. The broader society shares his sense that the proper response to a hardened killer is to leave no one in any doubt about how much one cares. As one of Moose's sergeants put it, 'We're the police, and we're expected to be the Rock of Gibraltar at all times, but we have emotions, too.' (Awww!) The former FBI agent Roger Depue, one of many 'experts' who have been called out of the woodwork for the occasion, opines, 'We say that the most beautiful phrase in the English language is "to love". But a strong second has to be "to help".' (Awww!) This obsession with caring is why, when the pattern of the murders made clear that they were not the work of some typically American race lunatic, the relief was palpable. The Washington Post's headline on the second day of the crisis ran: '5 Shooting Victims Reflect Montgomery's Growing Diversity.'
Being caring, of course, can get in the way of being brave, but we are a people that wants — even in emotional matters — to have our cake and eat it. Dick Adams, coach of the mighty Annandale Atoms high-school football team, said, 'On the one hand, we would like to move on and not let this person dictate to us. That's our sense of pride and commitment, that, by golly, this guy's not going to stop us. But on the other side, you're one shot away. And that just isn't worth it.' After Virginia's Randolph-Macon College cancelled orientation tours for which 100 students and their families had flown in from all over the country, its spokeswoman Anne Marie Lauranzon said, 'We're going to err on the side of caution without over-reaction.'
'Fear hurts you,' a Beirut-born immigrant told a local reporter. 'It hurts you more than being brave.' He sounds like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or some other representative of an America that no longer exists. Certainly, our enemies can only be heartened to see such a bumper harvest of panic reaped from such a small seeding of terror. To the world's great shattered national myths — that the English are reserved, for instance, or that Germans like to work — must be added the myth that Americans treasure liberty above all else. What we treasure, of course, is our reputation as 'nice guys', the kind of guys who are totally opposed to random killings, and don't care who knows it. Such habits of mind open up a broad field to the non-lilylivered. At Benjamin Tasker Middle School, where the 13-year-old boy was shot, the task of shepherding children into schools has been taken over by activists from the New Black Panther party.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
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