Anthrax "R" Us

In the wake of September 11, when the nation was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the media, apparently not satisfied with the disaster at hand, began disseminating the fear that terrorists, having succeeded in shutting down air travel and the stock market, might launch a follow-up attack using chemical or biological weapons. Whether the fear was prescient or causal, TV and radio journalists were soon to see it realized in a flood of anthrax mailings, five of them real and tens of thousands of them hoaxes. Conveyed on the waves of hysteria over anthrax, the impact of the terrorists' incursion spread to the far corners of the country—the West Coast, the South, the rural, the suburban— places that otherwise reckoned themselves low on the terrorists' list of potential targets. The shock waves unleashed by the airplanes that slammed into our nation's economic and military centers were displaced into vectors of biological attack, both real and imaginary. These fanned out and penetrated the most mundane recesses of hometown America. College mailrooms began quarantining cookies from home; tons of mail, including batches of SAT exams, were sealed and stockpiled for future anthrax testing; numbers of commercial flights were redirected and forced to land when white powder (invariably Sweet and Low) was discovered on tray tables. The trivial stuff of daily life—vanilla pudding mix, powdered sugar, flour, talcum powder—suddenly had the power to close schools, cancel the mail, shut factories, and otherwise halt business as usual.

The country was in a panic. White powder was turning up everywhere. Citizens were afraid to receive, much less open, their mail. Government agencies, the Postal Service, and the Centers for Disease Control were slow to issue precautionary advice. And when advice came, it seemed to heighten the public's anxiety. We were told to look for suspicious letters: no return address, curious combinations of postage stamps, downward slanting printing, inexplicable bulk, an unexpected package, and above all: white powder. We were told to seal the suspicious letter in a plastic bag, likewise our clothes, and shower immediately. With the advice came hundreds more hoaxes and hundreds more false alarms. People began demanding and stockpiling Cipro, the antibiotic of choice. Some, who were never exposed, began dosing themselves in advance even though doctors warned that the drug carried undesirable side effects.

Paranoia reached its apex with reports of real anthrax deaths. Some of the mortally stricken—the journalist for Sun News in Florida, the postal worker in New Jersey—seemed somehow more explicably in the terrorists' loop. Members of the media were clearly targets, although Sun News hardly ranks in importance with NBC. Postal workers were secondary targets brought into the terrorists' plot because the mail was the medium of delivery to primary targets like Senator Tom Daschle's office. We rationalized their deaths while we plotted our distance from government, the media, and the centers where mail is sorted. We relived the experience of children in the Cold War who computed the distance of their homes and schools from likely targets of nuclear attack. Some of us bought gas masks for ourselves and family members even though expert opinion held that anthrax spores could easily penetrate the masks' filters. All our strategies to create a sense of security collapsed when Kathy Nguyen, a hospital worker in New York, and Ottilie Lundgren, an elderly woman in rural Connecticut, both died of inhalation anthrax. Where were they on our imaginary maps of proximity to terror? By what convoluted logic might we connect their deaths to the targets we deemed intentional and thereby know that we didn't share their fatal connection?

In an effort to take control of the mounting hysteria, President Bush warned that anthrax pranks would constitute a "serious criminal offense." ¹ Hoaxers were threatened with a felony conviction under the legal rubric that penalizes for falsely reporting a fire or explosion. Even the threat of seven years' incarceration did not quell the hoaxers, although it...