JFK airport’s terror scare felt like a metaphor for modern America

I was crammed into the narrow cupboard of the Alitalia Business Class lounge at John F. Kennedy airport, along with a young school teacher from Brighton, nervous almost to the point of tears, a middle-aged couple from the Midlands and a stoic model from Brooklyn.

Outside, in the shadow of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner we were supposed to have boarded by now, hundreds of people thought that a terrorist gunman was on the loose. Police cars came and went at speed. One moment everyone was filing leftwards, shepherded by guards. Then there was a panic, and people sprinted the other way, out towards the dark runways in the distance. Others lay on the ground on the instruction of the police, and some took cover behind vans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uga5tBOsHo

This was not a scene of societal breakdown from a Philip Roth novel. It happened on Sunday night, on my trip back to London - a hysterical terror scare across two terminals of the most famous airport in the world, lasting the best part of an hour before the areas were cleared. We were let out of our cupboard by armed police, hands above our heads. The authorities could find no evidence of a gunman; the crowd - it seemed - had freaked itself out.

The JFK panic felt like a metaphor for what is currently happening in America, where every bit of information sounds like an omen, and where every conversation and gag ends with Donald Trump. A metaphor for a country acting on fear. People are on edge. Many genuinely do fear the things Trump - out of political expediency - claims to fear: outsiders; terrorists; the existence of an establishment conspiracy. Many others fear Trump himself, or at least the forces of reaction he is unleashing.

When people are scared they are vulnerable to making bad decisions and believing hearsay.  At JFK, the idea spread through a crowd of thousands of travellers that a gunman was in our midst. Everyone I spoke to imagined it roughly the same way - a terrorist mowing down trapped victims in shops, bathrooms and stairways - as happened in the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi or the Bataclan in Paris.

People are more likely to believe there is a crazed terrorist in their terminal when it has been suggested to them, repeatedly. They will believe that such a scene is possible, maybe even likely. Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention, echoing Nixon’s 1968 address, told Americans they were living through dark times. 'Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,' he said. It was an exercise in scaremongering that will take years to unwind.

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The scene outside Terminal 1 at JFK pic.twitter.com/BzUAdyDICS

— joshi herrmann (@joshi) August 15, 2016

The famous (though for a long time wildly overstated) panic following Orson Welles’ 'The War of the Worlds’ broadcast in October 1938 - when some listeners mistook the description of an alien invasion for a real news bulletin - took place in the context of ominous world events, notably the Munich Crisis. Welles said that had kind of been the point, admitting: 'We wanted people to understand that they shouldn’t take any opinion pre-digested, and they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap.' Is it too much to hope that Trump, a longtime TV thespian, is going to announce any day now that his campaign has been a fictional TV drama, intended to teach us a lesson about gullibility?

Trump can deliver five different lies in the course of one speech and his supporters won’t be disturbed. When did America stop checking its information and worrying about sources? The same lack of interest in truth was on show in the huge Facebook groups where Bernie Sanders’ most committed activists organised themselves and chatted. The members didn’t care if a link was from the Washington Post or an obviously dishonest left-wing clickbait site designed to juice traffic from the Bernie movement. If it told them what they wanted to hear, they ‘liked' it and shared it.

At JFK people seemed to be believing each other rather than the people in charge. Twice I heard people mention the cops with contempt as they tried to shepherd crowds around. The contrast to another airport experience I had earlier this year in San Francisco was striking. There, I was queueing for security when suddenly an alarm sounded for an emergency and everyone was told to leave by the nearest exist, avoiding elevators. People looked at each other, and nobody moved. We now ignore official commands but heed the unfounded instincts of the crowd.

Joshi Herrmann is editor-in-chief of The Tab. His previous writing for The Spectator can be found here.