A protester in front of the White House calling for a travel ban from West Africa. (photo: Allison Shelley/Getty Images)
Ebola Panic Is Straight From the Twilight Zone
25 October 14
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Making sense of the overheated Ebola and Klinghoffer panics.
n the two weeks since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, Ebola hysteria has taken hold
in some corners of the U.S., with school closures, paid leaves, and
cruise ship quarantines enacted to protect the populace from dozens of
people who did not actually have the disease. So far, only two people we
know of have been infected by Ebola on U.S. soil (both were nurses who
treated Duncan), public health officials have offered clear and
consistent explanations of the minimal risks of contracting the disease,
and even Fox News — or, at least, Fox News anchor Shep Smith — has tried to quell the panic. Why are Americans still so worked up about this?
Of all the incidents of runaway Ebola hysteria in America, the one that most grabbed me was reported by the Times on Sunday:
A man in Payson, Arizona, decided to submit to a self-imposed
quarantine and remain in his house for no other reason than he had been
in Liberia as a missionary on a church trip. His good deed did not go
unpunished: After taking that extra (and gratuitous) precaution, he
found himself the victim of a “lynch-mob mentality” manifested by at
least one anonymous threat to burn down his house. The incident made me
think of that classic 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,”
in which paranoid suburban neighbors, gripped by fear of an invasion
from outer space, do the monsters’ work for them by destroying their
community and each other in mob violence.
You know things are bad when a Fox News anchor is the
voice of reason, telling his viewers to ignore the “very irresponsible”
media voices fueling the Ebola panic. Of course, some of the most
irresponsible voices were on his own network, including George Will, who
malignantly spread the canard that Ebola was airborne, and Gretchen Carlson, an anchor who somehow found a conspiracy
connecting Ebola, the IRS, Obamacare, and, inevitably, Benghazi.
Right-wing radio has chimed in, and so have Republican politicians, who
have variously called for sealing borders and visa suspensions, as if
Ebola were another wave of immigrants in need of a fence.
Just goes to
show that it’s hard to create a coherent, let alone effective, policy to
deal with a medical emergency when you don’t accept the core notion
that there is such a thing as empirical scientific knowledge. The point
of all this political posturing is not to save lives, in any case, but
to somehow smear the president with Ebola for advantage in the election
two weeks from now.
It’s my impression that the panic is starting to ebb.
Enough sane voices, in the medical community, government, and even the
press, have beamed in the message that you are far more likely to be
struck down by the flu, guns, air bags, or even lightning than this
virus. But surely there will be some new panic to replace it soon. The
mood in the country is horrible, and we’ll keep searching for new
nemeses and new scapegoats. Once the election has come and gone — and
there’s no catharsis or improvement in the public mood, no matter what
the result — it will be fascinating to see what monsters will be sighted
on Maple Street next.
The Death of Klinghoffer — John Adams's 1991
opera on the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestine
Liberation Front terrorists — premiered at the Met on Monday, inciting a large demonstration
from protestors who claimed it was anti-Semitic and a distortion of
history. You were at the premiere. Is Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? And what
do you make of the uproar around it?
This is another example of displaced hysteria and it
has very little to do with the actual content of this opera, which most
of the time has been presented without protest in America (in St. Louis, yet)
and elsewhere over its 20-year-plus history. The sad fact is that in
the aftermath of this year’s Gaza war, an understandable panic has taken
root in some corners of American Jewry, who fear that support for
Israel is wavering even in this country — let alone in Europe, where an
alarming uptick in anti-Semitism is adding another toxic component to
perennial anti-Israeli animus. It’s easier to hyperventilate about an
opera giving a total of eight performances at Lincoln Center than to
address the graver issues at hand.
Most of those who have cast aspersions on Klinghoffer,
starting with Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation League and
continuing with those who echoed his views on Op Ed pages, have not seen it.
If they had been there Monday night, they might have been embarrassed
by the vast discrepancy between what was on stage and their public
pronouncements about it. Then again, maybe they still wouldn’t pay
attention. A heckler at the premiere repeatedly called out “The murder
of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!” — a true head-scratcher since
nothing in the opera asks for forgiveness of Klinghoffer’s murder or the
terrorists who committed it.
Klinghoffer has zero anti-Semitism. It does have what Justin Davidson of New York has accurately described
as a “clumsy libretto” — dramaturgically diffuse, often lyrically banal
— though it is far more lucid in this gripping, beautifully sung Tom
Morris production than it was in Peter Sellars’s original at BAM. Not
for a second does the opera present the terrorists as anything other
than cold-blooded killers — in Adams’s score and the staging as well as
in words — and not for a second does your heart fail to go out to their
victims, led by Leon Klinghoffer. The performance ends with a wrenching
solo by the widowed Marilyn Klinghoffer — “They should have killed me / I
wanted to die” — and, as Alex Ross of The New Yorker tweeted Monday night, “In the end, the protest failed completely. Marilyn Klinghoffer had the final word, and John Adams received a huge ovation.”
“Never forget” has been a Jewish imperative since the
Holocaust. What has been forgotten by the instigators of this
manufactured fracas is that many if not most people — non-Jews — have
forgotten both the Achille Lauro hijacking and Leon Klinghoffer in the
nearly three-decade-long crush of subsequent horrors in the narrative of
modern terrorism. The good news about both this production and the
extra publicity generated by the protests is that they will keep the
memory of Leon Klinghoffer and the barbarity of his killers alive. Most
people cannot get to the Met to see it, needless to say, and the cancellation of the originally planned Live in HD theatrical broadcast will further diminish the Met’s audience. But you can watch Klinghoffer on DVD in a previous production from England’s Channel Four or listen to the score in the definitive Nonesuch recording.
Such opportunistic Klinghoffer foes as Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz,
and the New York Democratic Congressswoman Carolyn Maloney will not be
able to restrict the circulation of these other iterations.
Indeed they
and the other protestors have already succeeded in temporarily selling
out the Klinghoffer DVD at Amazon. But you can still find either it or
the Nonesuch recording at Walmart, Target, and Barnes & Noble, or on
iTunes.
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