This one fed into the book chapter about the day the terrorists won. I wrote it in 2005, when the Department of Homeland Security had been publishing threat advisories for a few years and the ambient paranoia level in America had been running so hot for so long that it had started to look less like vigilance and more like a lifestyle industry.
The post was a link to a list — a satirical catalog of improbable terrorist schemes, the kind of thing that circulated online in the mid-2000s as a coping mechanism for people watching their government treat every citizen as a potential threat. Superglue in women’s makeup. Poison in Disney World water misters. Remote-controlled van bombs. The list is absurd, and that’s the point. The threat landscape being presented to the American public was comprehensive in a way that primarily demonstrated its own uselessness as a security tool. If everything is a potential attack vector, nothing is.
My note at the time: the most effective terrorist plan might just be to let George W. Bush continue destroying the US and her image around the world. Why attack a country that’s eating itself?
That observation belongs to 2005 and also, with light editing, to most years since. The pattern is durable. External threat narratives are maximally useful when the country is doing significant damage to itself. They provide a direction for fear that doesn’t point at the policy. The anthrax is in the Valentine roses. The knifemen are at the mall. Your neighbor’s weird delivery is suspicious. Meanwhile the healthcare costs another thousand dollars and the wages are flat again and the people who make those decisions are on television explaining why you should be looking over there.
The book chapter puts this alongside other pieces from the same era — the ELF arsonist-vs-terrorist question, the LAPD convention policing — to build a picture of the post-9/11 decade’s particular flavor of American paranoia.
—
*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
—
**You might also like:** [So Long, Dalai Lama: Google Adapts to China](https://www.vagobond.com/so-long-dalai-lama-google-adapts-to-china/), [Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered](https://www.vagobond.com/original-einstein-manuscript-discovered/), [The Terrorist and the Grid – New York Times](https://www.vagobond.com/the-terrorist-and-the-grid-new-york-times/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
—
A crypto startup called Petshitter — a platform to turn dog waste into crypto, pay people to collect it, and solve a real problem no one in tech has touched. A ridiculous ticket to $3 million in VC funding, a military-grade hazing boot camp, and a seat at the table of the most corrupt, brilliant, and self-congratulatory ecosystem in human history.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
