THE YEAR EMOTIONS RULED

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In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, critic Elaine Showalter exposes the enormous harm done by the recovered-memory syndrome as it was applied to everything from multiple personalities to intrafamilial sex-abuse cases, in which abuses "remembered" never occurred. Showalter also notes that hysterias tend to produce scapegoats, which was borne out by the Princess Diana paparazzi hunt. As gratifying as it may have been for people to find a target of blame, most journalists recognize that the difference between the paparazzi and legitimate news photographers is roughly 50 ft.

The frustration-with-detachment theory may sound more plausible than the apocalyptic, but is only slightly more down to earth. From the mid-1970s on, there has been an increasing disengagement of people from government, politics, community and, in some ways, from themselves; moreover, this disengagement has been actively sought. Not all that long ago, alienation from self and others was so universally thought to be the bugaboo of modern life that it was becoming boring to mention it. To be emotionally numb to experience, to live depersonalized, was to be unhappy. Not lately. With the notable exception of religious fundamentalism, the past 25 years have seen an aggressive pursuit of depersonalization, a shutting off of the emotions at once so purposeful and complete that many people, the young especially, speak of envying machines--a far cry from those earlier generations that feared nothing as much as becoming machines.

Women may have felt especially disengaged from emotions as they became more equal partners with men at home and at work, telling themselves that emotion-free male characteristics were more appropriate to their new status. At the same time, men were being urged to show their feelings more--with unsatisfactory results.

To some extent, the unrelenting sensationalism of the news, and of life as it has been portrayed on the daytime talk shows, added to the resistance to emotional responses. This was because, first, few things shock anybody anymore, and second, because people feel assured that all the freakishness of life will be normalized and neutralized on television. The too frequent child murders of the year, such as the killings in New Jersey (one by another child), the killings and shootings of and by schoolchildren in Mississippi and Kentucky, and the stories of newborns left in toilets or in Dumpsters ought to have aroused great public feelings of pity or rage. But they were defused at the outset by the fact that one knew they would be analyzed into the ground on TV. Everyone in America is on television. A child is killed, and moments later a distraught relative appears on camera perfectly composed because he or she has had plenty of practice with a camcorder.