Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Volcanic ashcloud of doom panic porn

As I said yesterday, it might seem quite surprising that some of our papers are lamenting the fact that Britain's closed off to the world - when that's exactly what they want most of the time.

But that is to suppose that they have strong principles, or beliefs, beyond a desire to get off on a frenzy of panic-porn and fear-tapping - and I'm not so sure they do. Fear of immigrants is a particularly useful fear to tap into because it's hard to disprove, whereas evidence seeming to back it up is everywhere - the anecdotes about immigrants taking jobs neatly rattled off as if they're true in the letters pages of the Daily Mail, for example.

In a sense, the fearmongering about volcanic ash from Iceland is exactly the same story.

PARALYSED BY THE VOLCANO is the same kind of story as we've seen before about stuff like swine flu, or SARS, or the Millennium Bug, and so on - here is this spectral thing, which is going to do us harm, and we can't do anything about it. There's an almost catastrophism fetish in our screamsheets, at times, which luxuriates in stories about Nostradamus predicting the end of the world, for example, or terrible viruses killing us all off; we've all read the stories and they appear quite regularly. I call it panic porn because instead of looking at the realistic scenario, newspapers gravitate towards the worst-case event, even if it's a remote possibility - like when cold weather struck and FREEZE MAY KILL 60,000. Just cold weather isn't good enough. Terrifying cold weather that could kill thousands? Now you're talking.

But I'd go a step further and argue this is exactly the same kind of fear-tapping these papers use when it comes to stuff like immigration - here comes the invasion of brown people, or Poles, or Romanian gypsies, or whoever it is this week we're meant to be scared of, and they're infecting us, and we can't do anything about it. Again, the fear of infection; the fear of contamination by an outsider; the fear of our green & pleasant land being damaged by these forces we can't control. Those are the key elements to a lot of tabloid stories, and they get repeated even on a smaller scale with silly stories about ladybirds or caterpillars or squirrels - same same, but different.

The volcanopocalypse, or ashmageddon, or whatever you want to call it, effortlessly glides along the same tramlines as these other stories. Here is this outside force. We can't do anything about it. It's coming to get us and infect us. It's going to contaminate us. It's going to cause chaos. We are powerless. Now, you could liken this to 1950s paranoia about Communists and draw parallels with similar popular-culture narratives about invading aliens; or you could say we're in a similar invasion/contamination paranoia right now because of fear of terrorism/dhimmitude, and so on. This is, I suppose, the overwhelming paradigm of these post 9-11 times: 'we' are under attack.

Whatever it is that we culturally like about this narrative, it's why the papers go big on it - ramping up the fear factor. Which is why it needs to be taken on a step further. It can't just be ordinary ash disrupting flights, causing a bit of travel bother and so on; it must be DEADLY.

You may not fall off your chair if I tell you that the story isn't quite about Britain getting a 'stay in or wear a mask' warning; that these warnings are for people with certain existing respiratory problems or conditions; that these warnings are only applicable if the volcanic dust begins to start settling at ground level, which it hasn't done yet; and it isn't quite the DEADLY DUST horror promised by the headlines. But you knew that already. What I'm interested in is the why. Again, the Express, like the Mail, constantly pushes the 'fear of immigration' storylines on its front pages, even stretching the truth when it needs to get from A to B in a hurry, pandering to racism and prejudice as it does so. I vary between (a) thinking the Express is simply racist and (b) thinking that racism is just a by-product of its desire to tell ghost stories. But here we go again: for the ghost story to be scary, it must result in death. Who cares about a few asthmatics getting breathing difficulties? Let's go for DEADLY DUST instead!*

The Mirror's take is interesting because that tries to demonise the ash cloud and personalise the fear. Look, it's got a vaguely face-shaped shape to it! It's a MONSTER! You'll recall at the time of 9-11 when people saw 'faces' in the explosions; this is the same kind of thing. It taps into another little fear-spilling part of the brain, that thinks this is the work of the devil or something; it's that ancient sun-worshipping bit of the brain that tries to make sense of stuff we don't understand by turning it into gods, monsters and dragons.

The storylines are familiar; the ash cloud simply happens to fit into a familiar type of story - one that we know and recognise. Are we panicking yet? Not really. I don't think so. But as time ticks on, and if the cloud doesn't go away, the fear might get turned up a notch. Are we really in terrible danger or not? The one place you won't be finding that out is on the hysterical front pages. I don't blame them; they've got a job to do - they're just selling a story. But the story they're selling might not quite be the same as what's actually going on - and that's pretty much the case all the time.

* If you ever get the chance, have a look at The Day The Earth Caught Fire. It's set in the Daily Express offices (and was filmed in the actual building IIRC) and tells of the earth heating up in a natural disaster. I find it interesting because it shows old-school journalists at work; not only that but these fictional old hacks remain much cooler in the face of a 'real' catastrophe than their contemporary real-life counterparts do in the face of a bit of cold weather. I suppose, in a way, the modern-day Express is always waiting for the earth to catch fire, and treats all stories as if it might.