4-H CLUB

The Guardian's Jackie Ashley worries that news reporting is causing hysteria. This doesn't stop her engaging in some hysterics of her own:

The horror in New Orleans, almost too big in scale to understand, is clearly linked to global warming, which is with perfect symmetry almost too big to confront.

We are caught in the politics of hysteria. Some scares are real enough. Inevitably, Hurricane Katrina is the worst; the stench of dirty water, death and racism rises from the page. The failures of the US administration, and of President Bush in particular, are of more than local interest. There is a Lord of the Flies familiarity about the stories of mayhem, rape and looting. But the really scary thing is the role of rising ocean temperatures in creating an unusually prolific and vicious hurricane season.

The racism claim is absurd and undeserving of comment. The hurricane evidence is doubtful at best. Jackie soldiers on:

In every case, we have to avoid hysteria and its by-product, which is fatalism or indifference.

Tell people day after day that the world is doomed because of a combination of George Bush and the motor car; or that the west is overrun by murderous nutters, furious about an illegal war that cannot now be sorted out; or tell them that modern life makes pandemics inevitable - tell them, even, that their jobs are doomed because of China and the rising economies of the east, and there is nothing that can be done. What will the result be? Not, as some naturally hysterical journalists hope, a general uprising against global capitalism. No, faced with apparently insurmountable problems, most people will turn back to private life, taking solace in another drink, friends and gossip.

Oddly, Jackie's the only person I recall claiming that hysteria produces indifference. Regardless, she quickly contradicts herself:

Hysteria about Islam shows us prize examples of how to make things worse. How quick, how easy it is to stop seeing people as people, and start seeing them as ciphers. One town in Belgium is to ban veiled women from its streets, or at least fine anyone caught wearing a veil.

In other words, hysteria about Islam produced an inappropriate knee-jerk reaction. Jackie's one mixed up woman. Maybe it has something to do with the newspapers she reads, and writes for:

Well, ideology, they say, has died, and few mourn it. But returning to drench myself in the papers, it seems more than ever that we are left instead with a mere shriek about huge, scary problems we are also told are too big, too complicated, to resolve. At every turn, there is a new threat to worry about, something else to fear and nothing that can be done.

William Safire certainly had the MSM pegged way back in 1970 when he wrote:

"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club -- the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

Take your meds and have a lie down, Jackie.