Matt Frei - Only in America

When I got to the office London was on the phone requesting a piece about the ‘panic buying’ of duct tape and plastic sheeting. It was all over the wires. I rang one of my most reliable sources. On the mobile phone I could hardly hear Penny’s voice for all the commotion. ‘Where are you, darling?’

‘I’m at Stroessniders,’ she said. Stroessniders is our local hardware store. ‘It’s mayhem here. Everyone is fighting over plastic sheeting.’

The last time she had bought plastic sheeting was for Amelia’s birthday parties to use as a cheap picnic blanket. Now her fellow shoppers were trying to follow the ‘Homeland Security terror threat advisory’ broadcast on the news the night before. This urged people to get hold of plastic sheeting to insulate their basements from any potential chemical attacks. Penny wondered if she should join in.

I called the crew and we raced up to Stroessniders. Penny had already gone, presumably busy measuring the windows for insulation, but the shop was crammed with women. Some in tracksuits, some in furs, some in hysterics, all tearing at bags of plastic sheeting as if their lives depended on it. Which, perhaps, they did. A new load of sheeting had arrived and was greeted at the door as if it were a shipment of rice and milk powder in an Afghan refugee camp. I noticed that people weren’t filling their shopping trolleys with just duct tape and sheeting. Torches, batteries, huge bottles of water, candles and matches were all flying off the shelves as if the whole of Washington was preparing for a long stint in a fallout shelter.

Bill Hart, the store manager, didn’t know whether to be delighted or distraught. He had sold two years’ supply of plastic sheeting in one day, he told me. But he himself didn’t have a clue which room to designate as the bunker in his own house. In aisle six (Glues and Adhesives) a heated discussion was under way.

‘For Chrissake don’t turn the playroom into your panic room! It’s below grade!’ The man seemed to know what he was talking about. He had horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair. He looked respectable, knowledgeable and authoritative. But he was also wearing a blue bow tie. Was he a mad professor or just mad? In the general absence of expertise everyone else was listening as if the shopper in the bow tie held the Chair for Applied Sciences at Georgetown University. ‘Chemicals don’t rise. They fall,’ he intoned, looking round at his audience, waiting to be challenged. ‘That’s how all those Kurds died in Iraq.’ I was about to pitch in and ask about the up or down movement of radiation, bacterial agents, mustard gas … but thought the better of it. Allan, the laconic Australian cameraman, was busy filming. I was busy trying to remember my O-level chemistry, but the only thing I remembered was that I had failed.

When I returned home that night my wife had packed a bag with extra clothing for the children and nappies. There were torches in every room, enough spare batteries to illuminate the whole neighbourhood, twenty litres of mineral water and three roles of duct tape; $1000 in cash had been stuffed into a sock in a drawer. ‘The ATM machines are bound to fail,’ she explained. I told her about the scene at Stroessniders, but she refused to see the funny side.

‘How many rolls of sheeting did you get?’

‘None,’ I confessed. ‘I forgot! Too busy filming,’ I explained feebly. Penny gave me one of those looks that best translates as: ‘Don’t you care about our four children!’

‘What do you want for dinner?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t care but don’t touch the tins!’ she added sternly. ‘They’re emergency rations.’

We spent the rest of the evening working out an evacuation plan. Everyone seemed to think that prevailing winds head north. So we should head west. West Virginia. Kentucky. But we only had a map of Maryland … and that was north. The BBC had conjured up an alternative evacuation plan for the office. This would involve taking a barge down the Potomac River to the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. No one seemed to have worked out how we would get to the barge, whether the authorities would stop all river traffic, whether the good vessel would be fast enough to escape the dangers or, indeed, what would happen to our families stranded at home with rolls of duct tape, plastic sheeting and tins of baked beans.

The evacuation plan lasted about three months before it was shredded, forgotten and replaced with nothing. Nevertheless the whole experience veered somewhere between the absurd and the sobering. We didn’t have a clue and nor, it seemed, did the authorities. It soon became clear that if the Nation’s Capital was subject to another terrorist attack the only thing we could count on was mayhem. At the end of 2003 a disgruntled tobacco farmer from Virginia drove his tractor all the way up I95 into the heart of Washington, DC, and parked it in the rectangular reflector pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a protest about a rise in the tobacco tax. The secret service initially thought it might be an impending terror attack. The man was targeted by police marksmen and Washington traffic ground to a complete halt for six hours. Memorial Bridge, one of the main escape routes, was closed and the city put on a spectacular display of road rage. God help us all if there was a genuine attack. It was a sentiment shared by many that day.

That night I listened to the radio on our screened porch, enjoying a post-traumatic stress cigarette. The local station introduced one of a whole regiment of retired colonels and generals who have benefited from the extraordinary growth in terror analysis and fear-mongering. The voice of ‘our in-house terror and security consultant’ boomed with unflappable confidence. A veteran of many wars, he was now a warrior of the airwaves. A nervous caller from Arlington asked about the effects of a dirty bomb.

‘I can assure you, Gene,’ said the colonel, ‘that if a dirty bomb went off half a mile from this building, you would be doing more damage to your health if you were smoking a cigarette outside.’ I looked at my Malboro Light glowing in the dark and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So much for ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’! Roosevelt is surely spinning in his grave while today’s political masters are telling us that the only thing we need to fear is the absence of fear. Fear is good. It keeps you alert. It also sets impossibly high standards of success in the ‘war on terror’. Since we came to the United States the country has apparently thrived on being afraid. First there were the colour-coded alerts. The word TERROR still flashes across our screens in a truly terrifying whoosh, especially on Fox TV, which would be bereft if America were universally loved. There is the obvious fear of terrorists wanting to blow up New York and Washington. Oddly, though, the fear of another terrorist strike grows the further away you are from the places that were actually hit. In lower Manhattan life got back to normal almost as soon as the rubble was cleared and Ground Zero became a large hole in the ground waiting to become a construction site. Property prices in the immediate vicinity slumped for a few months before resuming their astronomical climb. A big city like New York takes tragedies in its stride. The spirit is indeed unbeatable. But go to Omaha, Nebraska, or Martinsburg, West Virginia, both places that no self-respecting terrorist would ever bother with let alone find on the map, and the population is cowering behind triple-locked doors in fear of the extremist Muslim hordes.

If it isn’t the Caliphate that’s trying to topple the American way of life, it is the ‘superbug’ that could wipe out entire school communities in a day. If you watch Lou Dobbs on CNN, an anti-immigration campaigner masquerading as a broadcaster, you would think that the flood of illegal migration across the border means that we will all be made to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish and eat tortillas instead of hamburgers. If that isn’t enough, you can always rely on the Chinese to terrify you. It was bad enough when they were taking away hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs but now they are also trying to poison our toddlers by selling us toys laced with lead paint. In the run-up to Christmas 2007 some of the cable TV networks launched campaigns helping hapless Americans spot ‘toxic toys from China’, which they might have wanted to buy for their grandchildren. And if that’s not scary enough, just remember that China also owns most of America’s debt. The Yellow Peril is drowning in a sea of greenbacks. The Chinese could sink the dollar even further by dumping it on the market. ‘Beijing has become our banker’, as one commentator put it in the New York Times . ‘And you never pick a fight with your banker!’