University of Virginia Library

America, Fear, And Unreason

(Reprinted from The Daily Tar Heel, student
newspaper at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.)

For two months and some weeks now we
have watched the patterns of action and
passivity. The responsibility of this watch
being to analyze, we can arrive at some
general observations which filter down to the
specific.

The nation has just recently entered into
the beginnings of a frightening time. The
sinister implications veiled in the Vice
President's attacks on the press impose a
darkness upon the United States.

It would be difficult to justify Mr. Agnew's
criticisms of the news media by appraising his
position, and thus the position of the Nixon
administration, as one of certainty and power.
Granted, the Vice President hit upon some
valid criticisms of the printed and televised
news media which are expected to be
responsible organs of communication. But he
chose to attack the political opposition of the
media, rather than their professional failings,
an attack which leads us to believe the basic
motive of his actions was fear.

The fear which drives a high-government
official to lambaste the working press is one
which has dangerous political overtones. The
mood of the country is less than harmonious
and the most obvious result of the Agnew
dictums will be the hard polarization of the
political factions in this country.

Mr. Agnew's apparent abandonment of
rationale can logically and practically have the
effect of soliciting the support of the great
mass of Americans subconsciously afraid of
the active minority. The consequence of such
a crystallization of the masses would be to
enlist the support of the politicians near and
far on the local and state levels for the Nixon
government and its pronouncements on the
press.

As Richard Nixon proved in 1968, the way
to gain power is to read the masses. The
difference now is that the quiet fears of the
masses are being played upon by the Vice
President, rather than responded to. And the
result will be to realize what did not really
exist, and thus to create in the country a
madness and a dichotomy which do not really
exist.

The consequence for the working press will
be less quieting. The right of reportorial and
editorial freedom has been, despite Mr.
Agnew's claims to the contrary, called into
serious question.

The mood of the country has its own
sounding board in this University community.
The same valid criticisms which the Vice
President has about the major New York and
Washington newspapers have been unloaded in
the same terms by local critics of the Daily
Tar Heel. A principal tenet of the criticism has
been the political and philosophical nature of
the newspaper, rather that a constructive kind
of criticism about increasing journalistic
professionalism, an improvement which is
never far from the foremost thoughts of most
journalists, the ones on this newspaper not
excepted.

Again, we see in this community the same
fear which drives Mr. Agnew, the fear that
power and influence manage to operate
outside the walls of the White House, or
South Building, or the inner depths of
conservative strongholds. And that is the fear,
when unleashed on such institutions as the
press, which stirs up the worst kind of
political unrest: hard polarization.

One basic question seems to be why such
fear manages to override the rationale of
practical politics. To understand this we must
put the situation in its proper overall context.

The war in Vietnam forces young Americans
today to delve prematurely into considerations
of the nature of life and death. Such
considerations have had the effect of forcing
the question of freedom, and a resolution
about what meaning freedom will have, in the
lives of these Americans.

A great many, and the number increases
daily beyond expectancy, have decided, are
deciding, that individual freedom is more
important than being patriotic to any cause,
particularly the Vietnam war, which may have
death as one possible outcome. Consequently
the decision is made to ignore the sacred rules
of the society and to attempt to construct
some life pattern on the basis of a new way of
looking at the world with the new phenomena
which exist in the world.

There is, of course, the war. There is also
the advent of the mass media which
profoundly influence the thought-processes
and psychology of the television generation.

The youth of America have grown up
being plugged into the media, a fact which
serves as a pivotal point for the dichotomy of
America today. The older America assumes
that basic truths about life exist - about right
and wrong and the like - whereas the younger
America tends more and more to question
those truths and to assume that the
knowledge of right and wrong will come only
with experience, which must be permitted to
occur naturally.

This split is one major reason for the fear
which drives, say, Spiro Agnew and his
counterparts. That older America fears the
rise of a generation which does not accept the
traditional truths. Such fear is subconscious
and rests quietly beneath the surface.

The fear is heightened, however, when the
untraditional generation begins to amass some
small semblance of power, which it then uses
to criticize what it sees as the utter failings of
the traditional generation.

The most devastating action, then, the one
which sharpens these fears and begins to set
them in bitter motion, is the action which
strikes out in none-too-subtle terms at the
power of the opposition, not in a critically
constructive way, but merely as an act of
opposition.

This is what is happening today in
America. The people like Spiro Agnew, and
even some of his local counterparts in Chapel
Hill, are acting out of fear and condemning
any party which opposes them - youth, the
news media. As a result, the fears of the
masses are inflamed and they flock to
condemn the opposition. And by the same
token, the ones who are attacked, the youth
in America, and the press - are pushed
further to the belief that the past and its heirs
have nothing to offer and thus the only
solution is a total abandonment of the old
truths.

The worst has yet to be realized, but the
signs are most surely there that America's loss
of reason is her greatest enemy, and that
enemy has no better messenger than Spiro T.
Agnew.