I want to talk about fear, and how it can be used to promote evil.

This may sound disingenuous, coming from a writer of horror fiction. In horror as a genre, of course, the danger is almost always contained within the very nature of the experience itself. We know it’s all just a STORY. We know Dracula isn’t real, even though sex and blood and transgression can make us feel both anxious and excited. We know, even in Stephen King’s subtlest tales, that there will always be good guys around to fight and defeat the bad guys.

The horror of Oedipus would be unbearable in real life. But in a play we can experience katharsis, pity and terror, and then LEAVE THE THEATER. We come out of the experience still alive and whole, neither blinded nor damned.

But in the large, amorphous arena called Real Life, fear is enormously useful as a means of control, and the first thing evil wants to do is control people. This isn’t news. We’ve seen fascism demonize “the other” countless times, whether by race or creed or nationality. We’ve seen unreasoning panic lead to mob violence, which can then be used by those in authority as an excuse to crack down, substituting quiet for energy, and replacing the messiness of anarchy with the calmness of silence and dread.

I’m old enough to remember this happening over and over again. When Richard Nixon was disgraced, the Republican Party had to regroup, and they embraced two magnificent strategies: hope and fear. It was “morning in America” (if you were white and rich) and there was an “evil empire” threatening to destroy us.

The irony was that by the 1980s, the Soviet Union was a corrupt and languishing shell. This fact probably wasn’t lost on the men who defined this strategy, and it worked: it worked to cover up arms dealing and numerous “little” wars, the dismantling of the American pension system, supply-side economics and the triumph of corporatization, and the rise of a strident, seductive, 24-hour media industrial complex, intent on ratcheting everyone’s fear quotient up to eleven every day.

Fast forward into the 90s, when we were all happily indulging in conspiracy theories about aliens and devil worship, and you get to….9/11. What a gift! No, I’m not about to go down the rabbit hole of saying that was a put-up job. What I WILL say is that Al-Qaeda succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in giving the controlling elements in America (the wealthy, the armed, the xenophobic and the ambitious) limitless scope to exploit America’s fears.

We created the Department of Homeland Security, which guaranteed we would never feel secure again. We beefed up our armed forces to the cost of trillions of dollars. We started two wars (against Afghanistan, which happened to be hiding Osama bin Laden at the wrong time) and Iraq (which happened to be horrific, but was innocent of attacking us). And we established a climate of suspicion and terror which has rotted our society from within for the past quarter century.

Now here we are, experiencing the full firehose of fear every day…and the one hopeful sign is that the whole thing seems to be getting a little bit OLD. You can only incite panic in a crowded theater so many times, before the audience says, “Shut up and let us watch the movie.” This may not be exactly complimentary to America’s morality–the fact that we shrug off the instruction to be afraid in favor of being mindlessly distracted–but I think it MAY signal a crack in the overwhelming power of evil’s propaganda.

No one believes we were threatened by Venezuela. No one accepts that hordes of illegal immigrants are rampaging through our cities, setting fire to New York or eating cats in Ohio. No one thinks Iran was preparing to attack anybody except Israel, and perhaps its neighbors…a reason to use diplomacy to contain it, but not to throw a string of firecrackers into a munitions factory and then hope for the best.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and there’s one born every minute, but I really don’t think Americans are so stupid that we will endlessly believe there’s an invisible monster under the bed. Horror is fun in stories. We get to confront our fears in the safe context of play. But I truly believe “we are not descended from fearful men” (or women) and Edward R. Murrow was right, “We will not walk in fear one of another.”

We’re not that dumb.

Good night and good luck.

Love and XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks