Is the risk of another terrorist attack in the U.S. like the San Andreas fault or like the phone call you’re still waiting for from that cute boy you’ve got a crush on? As time elapses without the anticipated event happening, in other words, does its likelihood increase (like an earthquake in a fault zone) or decrease (like the phone call that never comes)? During the Bush years, I used to ask various conservative pundits if we could ever recalculate the risk of a terror attack downwards as years passed without another hit. The answer was always no. Clark Kent Ervin, a former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, encapsulated the conceit that no news is always bad news when it comes to terrorism in a Washington Post op-ed in 2006: “The very fact that there hasn’t been an attack on a soft target in the United States increases the danger of one,” he wrote.
But despite such assertions, public terror rhetoric has gradually, imperceptibly, abated over the last two years. The muted reaction to the disruption of a possible bomb plot against New York City suggests that the public and media have recalibrated the relative risk and importance of the terrorism threat. Of course, the modest coverage of the arrest of suspect Najibullah Zazi may simply reflect the fact that they got him before rather than after an attack. But I would like to think that even if a terrorist did pull off a bombing in a subway or department store, we would react as the British have, seeing terrorism as a horrifying but manageable problem, not as a “civilizational threat,” as it was commonly called during the Bush years.
The change in public discourse is really quite remarkable. Almost gone is a genre I used to call terror porn, which consisted of identifying a target, then positing an evildoer perfectly placed to destroy it. The terror pornographer’s motto was: for every vulnerability, a terrorist. “Got Toxic Milk?,” a New York Times op-ed from May 2005, was a locus classicus of the genre. Lawrence Wein, a professor of management science, detailed the consequences of poisoning the nation’s milk supply with botulism, dwelling lovingly on how the victims would react. But he offered no evidence that any terrorist anywhere had ever contemplated an attack on the nation’s milk supply; he simply conjured such a villain to produce the desired effect. Continue reading