h a l f b a k e r yGo ahead. Stick a fork in it.
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Each capital city of a sovereign nation would have its own National Hysteria Museum.
In the museum would be a sequence in chronological order of all the things that the nation as a whole have got really, really worked up and anxious about since its foundation.
Some of these exhibits would of course
be perfectly reasonable and rational motives for mass fear and panic, i.e. being invaded by the Germans, the Black Death, massive volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and Barry Manilow.
Some of them, although genuine, would in retrospect turn out (for some nations) to be entirely trivial, for example the Y2K panic, the AIDS pandemic, and Global Warming.
This would allow visitors to put things in a bit of historical context.
The final gallery would contain exhibits of all the things that the population are currently preoccupied by - migration, sea level rising, currnecy instability - along with the actual politicians involved in "solving" the problem or issue, having been for exhibition reasons stuffed, mounted, and displayed in lifelike poses behing glass, along with recordings of their pronouncements right up to the moment the taxidermy ninja snatch squad caught up with them.
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This makes me overly anxious, for some reason. |
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Does the café serve Red Bull or Quaaludes? |
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Both, in the same glass ... |
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Has someone already beat us to posting Taxidermy Ninja Squad here? |
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But hang on. Some national hysteria - like say "vaccines cause autism" may be thoroughly rebutted. Some would be - as you say - obvious in hindsight as the concerns were borne out by events. But there's a third category - where the mitigation strategy was necessary and successful, and hence was widely considered an overreaction due to the failure of predicted events to occur. And indeed a fourth category, where the scenario did in fact play out in line with predictions - and millions of people died - and it was all a bit trivial to people who wern't affected. |
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You had my bun right up until the point you started talking
about Barry Manilow. That invasion was real. |
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//Some of them, although genuine ... Global
Warming.// |
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A-hem. A-very-much-hem, [8th]. |
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Dustin Hoffman, shirley ? |
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Would the War Of The Worlds radio broadcast make the list? |
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Hmm, any connection to the Metric War
Museum? |
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This reminds me of a litany of news reports shown in one Michael Moore movie, including killer bee warnings. Every exhibit would need a tiny argument room, the way airports in the middle east have prayer rooms. |
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//A-hem. A-very-much-hem, [8th].// |
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Max, are you actually Ben Carson in disguise? |
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The birds and polar bears would like to have a word. |
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