Word: terrorization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...malignity converge; it doesn't matter whether an explosion is touched off by a fanatic or a mischief maker--the cause is buried by the effect. A bomb is like the physical equivalent of an insinuation--an anonymous, handwritten note that says, "Just when you thought you were safe..." Terror now lurks in the shadows like a stranger in a dark ramp behind the parade of nations...
...devastated, but did not halt, the Olympic Games, when 11 members of the Israeli team were killed by Palestinians in Munich in 1972. But this determination not to let a terrorist act obliterate the Olympic spirit was also a stance against an unwanted future--against an awful time when terrorism might become woven into the fabric of American life. And the Games, as they go on, must do so under different rules. For despite authorities' worst fears that something like this would happen in Atlanta, despite unprecedented precautions and a massive security effort, it is beginning to feel...
...civilian garb, on the lookout for anything suspicious. In addition, the Army has bomb-dismantling experts and specialists trained to deal with chemical or biological weapons at the ready in Atlanta, along with more than a dozen scientists from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team to deal with atomic terror. Metal-detection equipment is set up outside all venues, and a sophisticated security system matches live handprints to a chip on your ID badge. The Olympic Village is a virtual fortress: on city streets, manhole covers have been welded down to prevent anyone from getting access to power lines...
...after the Atlanta bomb. It has certainly never been a risk-free country. Risk, in fact, is supposed to be the official American game. The American story has always been able to accommodate the irreconcilable narrative lines of 1) considerable American violence and 2) the virtuous American exemption from terror and such "foreign" evils...
...close enough in history to Oklahoma City, to leave in Americans' minds a conviction, developing like a Polaroid picture, that their nation is somehow in the process of losing whatever may be left of its old immunity. For a long time, Americans have nervously congratulated themselves that terror was an evil native to other lands. The complacent thought picked up, almost unconsciously, on the founding American premise of a new world divinely sponsored, a sort of immaculate conception...