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player ready...A century or so hence, they will come up with the definitive term for it. They will cull from the welter of possible names a single name, a name that hits the ear just right, like the curtly satisfying clack of one billiard ball striking another: Yes, they will say. That’s the perfect descriptive label for the period just after the turn of the 21st Century. That’s it.
The name could be many things, but I think it may very well be this: the culture of dread.
We are living in the culture of dread, in a time when menace looms and danger lurks behind the living room drapes, fingering a knife and waiting to spring. We are living in a time when time is measured by the number of days without an “incident,” with no breach of airport security or e-mail threats from untraceable sources.
The culture of dread didn’t commence precisely on Sept. 11, 2001. It began shortly thereafter and it took a while to get going: We had to become aware, gradually but surely — for that is how dread operates, it’s a slow-motion panic — that bad things not only could happen, but would happen, and even the most conscientious efforts to thwart them might not be effective.
Manifestations of the culture of dread are all around us: rows of armed law enforcement officers ringing airport terminals like human barbed wire; security personnel stationed in offices and schools, routinely searching bags and purses and demanding the constant display of identification cards. Who are you, what is your business here?
We need all of this, of course. These are perilous times, times that absolutely require dramatically increased security measures and institutionalized paranoia.
But occasionally I have wondered, as I hurry past the armed guards at airports with my head down, trying to look innocent — which I am, but somehow being innocent doesn’t seem like enough, one must look the part as well — about the effect of the culture of dread.
I have wondered, as I join the nation in waiting anxiously for news reports about the fate of kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl — held hostage in Karachi since Jan. 23 and, God willing, still alive, as of this writing — about the impact of mass unease.
How long can we live this way, waiting for the other shoe-bomb to drop? And when it is over, what will be the residue from this time of grim vigilance?
I’ve been surprised, thus far, by what the low-level but very palpable dread has done to us. I’m amazed at our apparent appetite for entertainments that almost mock our fear and loathing: the thrillers that soon will proliferate on the nation’s movie screens. At a showing last weekend of “The Mothman Prophecies” — itself a glossy specimen of creepy dread — all of the trailers were for goosebump-inducing films, from “Panic Room” to “Frailty” to “Dragonfly” to “Murder by Numbers.” You’d think we’d have had quite enough of fright and suspicion, but no: We want our art to give us the same thing back again, complete with special effects and pretty faces. Or maybe it’s just Hollywood’s idea of a homeopathic remedy: a pinch of the bad stuff to ward off its return in a more ferocious form.
Some have compared this era to the Cold War, when Americans lived in the shadow of a nuclear threat, but the present age strikes me as fundamentally different: This is no doomsday “scenario.” Ground Zero is the literalization of our worst fears.
How long can we live in the culture of dread? Anthony Hecht’s poem “Terms” foretold the present predicament. “Ours is a wound that bleeds and will not close,” he wrote, ending with this: “Our need of grace/Grows ominously, a malign, ingrown/Melanoma, softly spreading its dark tide.”
How long?
This much we know: a bit longer.
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