The oil crisis felt like an anonymous threat that anxious publics projected onto Arabs
Evidence
What the consumer of news and of oil sensed, in short, was an unprecedented potential for loss and disruption with no face or visible identity to it. All we knew was that what we took for granted was about to be taken from us. We could no longer drive our cars the way we used to; oil was much more expensive; our comforts and habits seemed to be undergoing a radical and most unwelcome change. Even the oil — that is, the actual material in question — remained vague in comparison with the threat of losing it: no one seemed to know whether there was a real shortage, or whether the long gas lines were induced by panic, or whether the oil companies’ inexorably rising margins of profit had anything to do with the crisis. Other things seemed more relevant. Robed Arabs, fantastically monied and well armed, obtrusively appeared everywhere in the West. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 167
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the ‘signal, no face or visible identity’ dynamic from the information-overload and noise-chatter themes in earlier reading about structureless threats. — connects to: Economic crises of the 1960s-70s produced the Arab terrorist figure as a moral panic. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 93