Scared mindless: the essence of being an American we never talk about

To be an American, you have to sign on to being scared: “I pledge allegiance to living in fear.”

When you look below our self-congratulatory, feel-good surface, you find a society pockmarked by fear. This creepy feeling has persisted throughout our history to this very day. Fear of blacks. Fear of God. Fear of women. Fear of equality. Fear of communism. Fear of homosexuals. Fear of crime. Fear of the bomb. Fear of science. Fear of terrorists.

Seems like no one can run the country without scaring the hell out of us. Seems like the citizenry cannot live except in fear. There’s always some enemy that our politicians tell us to be scared of. But if you think our biggest fear is the fear that drives our national policy, you’re wrong.

We live our biggest fear in the workplace. That’s the hidden secret of American life. Fear of the boss. Fear of getting fired. In no other country on earth is the workplace so hierarchically fear-based, with supervisors supervising workers, and supervisors supervising supervisors, all the way to the top. It’s the system: everybody watches everybody else. There prevails an ongoing obsequious accommodation with a bright, smiling, cheery hypocrisy, that no one has the guts to expose.

We walk around being major suckups, 24/7. We kid ourselves we’re totally happy and fulfilled in our jobs, but we spend most of our working days in an unexpressed fear, so ingrained we’re hardly conscious of it. That is, until someone gets fired, when our fear jumps right up into our faces, and we avoid the fired person like the plague, because there but for the grace of our boss, go we. There, out of the door, walks the embodiment of our fear. That’s why we’re too scared to talk to the poor fellow. Fear is contagious.

There’s very little we can do about our fear, either. As any union official will tell you, the Bill of Rights stops at the factory gates. In 30 states it’s legal to get fired for being married, for being single, for being pregnant, for being you. You can sue if you get fired on gender and ethnic grounds -- but not if you get fired for your politics, for example. A woman got fired during the election because she had a John Kerry bumper sticker. She didn’t proselytize for Kerry; all she did was have that sticker. Her boss wrote memos telling his workers they should vote for Bush. He could do what he wanted. Not her. If she were a Republican, a Democrat boss could as easily have fired her.

Did her boss do anything wrong? No. Firing her was perfectly legal. She had no redress. The power of the boss is absolute, and accordingly, so is the fear of the workers. Our fear turns the workplace into a form of prison. We live in genteel slavery on the company plantation.

One reason this condition persists is because of how our bosses -- our elite -- regard us, the underclass of worker bees. Our bosses (and their mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal) think of us as poor people who have to be terrified into submission. We, their workers, are naturally lazy and shiftless. We have to be motivated by fear, instead of by benefits, as happens elsewhere. Of course, our bosses reward themselves with outrageous salaries and benefits, but what’s good for the gander is not good for the goose. They keep the workers on a short leash.

In Europe, on the other hand, workers have rights. They don’t work in fear, like here. Sometimes their economies don’t grow as fast as ours, but that seems a small price to pay for not living in fear. It also means they get decent vacation time. In the U.S., the only man with a good stretch of vacation, five weeks, is the President. But he lives in fear, too. If we have to believe him, he started a war with Iraq because he was scared.

Besides the fear that rules the workplace, there’s another general social fear: the fear of being out of step. It consists of really stupid fears, like the fear of wearing the wrong clothes. This scares us into buying the things that tell everyone we’re part of the herd: we’re hip and cool and really American. Drivers of SUV’s: now there’s a bunch of scared consumers.

Every now and then, our fear bubbles up to the surface, like during the McCarthy era, when only 200 people were locked up for Communist membership, but the whole society lived scared. Today our Christian Radicals fear modernity and the growing equality of women.

Our country’s biggest problems are things like healthcare, education, poverty, infant mortality, etc. But the politicians say our biggest issue is national security. In other words, they run on a platform of fear, not on a desire to solve our real problems. That’s why Hillary backs Bush’s war. She’s a politician, so she signs on to the politics of fear. Politicians have their own fear: the fear of being soft. To be a successful politician, you have to out-tough the other guy. Be a bully, a loudmouth. Our current administration is a prime example of the fear of being soft. All administrations are. When Bill Clinton ran for president, he took time off to make sure a guy got executed in his home state: he feared being seen as soft, and used the death of a criminal to look tough. How disgusting.

The sad truth of America is that we collaborate with our fear and our fear mongers. Fear unites us. Fear makes us a nation. A nation of fear-loving sissies.

America is a land of three enduring myths. The myth of the individual, in a country where most of us conform slavishly to our various herd mentalities. The myth of social mobility, when the vast majority of us die in the social class into which we were born. And the myth of freedom, when we’re enslaved by fear at our jobs.

Will we ever wake up? Have no fear, we won’t. Our fear is as American as apple-pie and violence – our violence being, of course, just another way in which we express our fear.