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Media hype is ahistorical. Intimate electronic magnification causes the present vividness and trauma to override memory and the rational sense of historical proportion. We have all lived with the media effect for a long time and have made our inner adjustments to it. The trouble is that the left brain reads and the right brain watches television. The TV-watching eye takes in the explosion in Atlanta and the fireball over the ocean and the crater in Oklahoma City, and relays the shocking images to the center of the brain, which by reflex extrapolates a world menaced by terrorists at every intersection.
But the side of the brain that reads and remembers thinks back a bit, to the '70s, say, and recalls not only Munich but also a procession of equally bloody terrorist horrors--airliners hijacked to the desert or to Entebbe, airports blown apart by bombs in Tel Aviv and Rome, the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang and all their telegenic stunts. These spectacles occurred outside the U.S., of course. On the other hand, in April 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it looked as if every city in America was on fire. So much for immunities.
It is likely that when right brain and left brain consult with each other and add up the damage, they find that the sum of human terrorism--even of evil--remains eerily constant.