It was dryly noted in the news last week that investigators of the TWA 800 disaster off Long Island last month, after having recovered 80% of the plane, have found no evidence whatsoever of explosives and are now looking primarily at mechanical failure as the reason for the crash.

It's eerily reminiscent of the Oklahoma City bombing last year, when politicians and talk-radio yahoos alike were ready to bomb some Middle Eastern country (pick one; they're all alike) in retaliation until discovering the likely culprits came from Michigan. None of these same morons then advocated bombing Detroit--though years of official malice toward inner cities have certainly left Detroit with that appearance--and none minded too much that the repressive, civil-liberty-stripping "counter-terrorist" border measures begun in response were containing a phantom threat.

This time, chances are excellent the post office will not scurry to take down its absurd new signs requiring folks with packages over a pound to register with the FBI (or whatever). The climate of terror from these incidents is primarily generated by official news sources and stoked by a media hungry for conflict and emotion. People see these signs, remember the blaring headlines for days about a bomb on that TWA flight, and it adds to the general sense that We Are Under Attack. And the corollary, which is that sometimes you have to give up a few rights in order to secure greater public safety. Lost in the manipulation of these emotions for political gain is a simple fact: there was, in all likelihood, no bomb.

If there was, of course, the destruction of Flight 800 would surely qualify as a dastardly deed--but even then, it pales as a modern terrorist act. Most of the truly terroristic acts these days are committed by governments, against their own or each others' citizens. 567,000 Iraqi children have died in five years due to U.S. economic policy, a policy designed to punish innocents so that others will behave the way we want them to. THAT is terrorism. And it would take an Oklahoma City-sized bombing every business day for the next eight years to equal, in tonnage and carnage, what the U.S. inflicted on the residents of Baghdad in six weeks in 1991.

Closer to home, in the United States, where our leaders rush to gut the constitution when a pipe bomb goes off, an average of one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two women are reported raped every day. Virtually all of these attacks are committed by men, a majority by men that the women know--a brutal way to use power and control to force desired behavior, and cumulatively representing nearly 700,000 acts of terrorism a year. Where is the official outrage?

There is no equivalent outrage, of course, for several reasons. (Among them, that women--like the poor, queers, the mentally ill, or people of color--are by definition not considered "innocent" victims.) But the relevant reason here is that the deaths aren't what's important in headlines about the TWA crash; what's politically useful is the fear they instill, the fear that allows greater and greater state authority. As with Mafia protection rackets, the real thugs are the ones offering safety.

The eagerness of officials and media to embrace a big bang theory for TWA also points up another interesting and manipulative bias. It is useful to instill fear in people; but it is NOT useful to question the infallibility of machines. Mechanical failure has resulted in far, far more air fatalities in any given year than terrorist attacks; but it's the last thing our corporate-friendly, techno-dependent information sources want us to consider. That's particularly true in Seattle, where if the icecaps were to melt tomorrow the local papers' headlines would speculate on the impact upon future Boeing sales; but it's true everywhere, and not just with airplanes.

People know in their daily lives that these fancier and fancier gadgets (computers, cars, VCRs) frequently don't work right; but the Official Universe of better and better technology spurring tons of sales to happy consumers does not find skepticism (or latent neo-Luddism) useful. We can have acts of God, or acts of terrorists, or acts of incompetence, but we can never, ever have dangerous, malfunctioning or useless technology. When this dynamic influences something as established as airplanes (which are rather safe compared to, say, cars), it makes ya wonder what we haven't yet heard about the immediate and long-term risks of all the new, inscrutable machines in our lives.