>Maureen, you and Cockburn are talking about two different things. You are
>talking about the meaning of the satanic conspiracy hysteria, which like
>every hysteria, had a meaning; Cockburn is concentrating on the fact that
>it was a hysteria, and that it's an outrage that its evidence was accepted
>in court.
I appreciate your (as usual) moderating interventions here, Michael. And I agree with most of your post. Except that no, AC and I are not "talking about different things": I _want_ there to be distinctions made between urgent practical matters such as rallying to get innocent people out of jail (or being viligant towards militias), and complex social realities behind such phenomena.
With the daycare panics, AC didn't imply any such distinction but instead dismissed the whole phenomenon as so much "mindless, demented hysteria." (Carol Tavris's already mentioned NYT article, and her discussion of child-abuse scares/recovered memory, etc. in her book _Mismeasure of Woman_ is a good example of an intervention that admirably addressed both levels: immediate advocacy matter and larger social context.) Then, when it comes to AC's macho militias, his lack of distinction-making runs to the very opposite extreme of embracing certain social realities behind the militias' anti-government conspiracy theories at the expense of the practical matter of drawing attention to their own capacity to "shatter lives" of innocents. I find that kindof interesting.
More broadly: your argument has an "of course" tone (e.g., that every panic, "has a [social] meaning," etc.), behind what I agree ought to be mundane points. But they're points lost on many. And while there are many fetishizations to be vigilant about, the one I'm drawing attention to here the one that draws imaginary lines between social phenomena that are "pathological" (hence not deserving of serious consideration) and those which are "normal." Like all fetishizatons that emerge within unequal social structures, this one also has damaging effects in the real.
--M