Word: glassner
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...moving train, but that doesn't mean we can't worry about it. Y2K was a bust, but anxiety is still America's leading psychiatric disorder. "We're living in about the safest times in human history, yet people seem to be more afraid than ever before," says Barry Glassner, a sociologist and the author of The Culture of Fear. "This book works right off the prevailing ethos that you should be afraid of all the wrong things." A sequel is expected next year. The Worst-Case Scenario Travel Handbook will cover such things as hostage situations and civil unrest...
...trading-floor massacre in Atlanta, where an investor killed nine people before turning the gun on himself--attracted extensive live coverage on TV news channels. Anyone tuning in could be forgiven for thinking that the U.S. is in the grip of an epidemic of workplace homicides. Says Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear: "You start wondering whether the person at the next desk...
What these acolytes are really seeking is moral purity, says Glassner. Proper eating and exercise, he writes, have become "moral acts." Such is the paranoia about staying well that, in his view, Americans have reverted to "some of the least appealing beliefs found in so-called primitive societies." Illness, for example, is viewed not as a natural process but the result of immoral action. Explains Glassner: "We suspect the illness was the person's own fault: he or she should have exercised or eaten properly...
...Glassner argues that Americans have become so fixated on their bodies because they feel they have little control of the world around them. They are constantly bombarded by news reports of carcinogens and pesticides in food, of asbestos fibers falling from ceilings, of pollutants in their tap water. "The body has always been a medium for expressing attitudes toward the world," says Jonathan Moreno, a medical ethicist at George Washington University, and today's obsession with healthy bodies is no different. "If our bodies are perfectible, then the world itself should also be," he says. "People who exercise want...
...Glassner also believes Americans "must find other, more realistic options" to this "tyranny of perfection." He does, however, see some hope in the notion that people are beginning to discover that what they once thought of as the ideal body isn't quite so ideal after all. Instead, "it stands not only for beauty and health," he says, "but also for false hopes and prejudices." Moreover, he notes, "that knowledge may be disheartening at first, but it also frees us -- to exercise and eat in ways that match our own needs rather than the dictates of the latest...