Conspiracy, Control, and Crichton
State of Fear is about more than controlling the weather. Duh, it's media ecology.
Reviewed by Read Mercer Schuchardt | posted 2/02/2005 12:00AM
London. Global warming is approaching the critical point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea-levels would be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned yesterday.
— Associated Press, January 25, 2005.
When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
— Jesus Christ, Matthew 16:2-4
Just an unattended bag? Or a bomb?
— NJ Homeland Security poster
The day after Christmas turned out to be a living nightmare reminiscent of The Day after Tomorrow.
— Arthur C. Clarke, credited with first conceiving the idea of global satellites, describing the tsunami's effect on his homeland of Sri Lanka
Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.
— Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars
Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p. 44.
Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world … But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?
— Galatians 4:3, 9
Live By It.
—Tagline of The Weather Channel
Michael Crichton's latest book, the eighteenth from this prodigious gentleman, will remind you simultaneously of recent disaster movies and recent weather forecasts. The trick is figuring out which one is an advertisement for the other.
Immediately after 9/11, critics agreed that it was eerily reminiscent of the movie The Siege. In more recent news of fearful disaster, the tsunami in southeast Asia looked like something from the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and this according to no less a thinker than Arthur C. Clarke. Remember the irony: that film was roundly ridiculed on its release for junk science of the propagandistic left wing variety, despite containing several elements of right-wing science: sudden climate change (including animals flash-frozen in mid-bite) massive and instantaneous geological movement, and a plot device that allowed for the Gutenberg Bible to be the only item saved from a library destined for destruction. In retrospect, the movie almost reads like a stealth defense of creation science.
What if man-made disasters could be disguised as natural disasters, and sold to the population as a stealth means of political control? That is the essential question that Crichton's novel asks and attempts to answer. How you answer it depends on where you stand in the impolite conversation going on in the culture wars today, the one about whose science will get taught. It is so awkward that most avoid it, and yet it touches on almost every issue.
Crichton's novel fearlessly jumps into this conversation and reveals not only the psychological "state of fear" that has been induced in recent history, but also the political "state" of fear that we live in, and how political interests, via mass media, massage and manipulate us into succumbing to their definitions. It is classic advertising consumer psychology: The way to motivate the consumer is through the carrot or the stick, through the promise of reward or the risk of punishment. Heaven or hell, security or fear, it's all the same if it creates the desired result — which is an outcome of predictability and control.
February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49
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