Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.
ROBERT FROST
What it is is a company selling ‘clothing
for the disaffected youth culture’,
T-shirts and sweatshirts, mostly black,
someone’s marketing vision for a new world,
a twenty-first century Henry (‘You can have
any color you want so long as it’s black’) Ford,
that old-time anti-Semite, his going-on-bankrupt
namesake corporation supplanted by this other.
A button on the website reads ‘Ready to Order Fear’,
but everywhere you look it’s free: fear of wolves,
bulls, and bears; fear of the sun, fear of that one
or this one, fear that all it takes is one. Storm fear,
house fear, fear of frost. Fear of gravity is barophobia,
but there’s also Cape Fear, Camp Fear,
and Fear Mountain: you can visit those. There’s fear
of God, fear of the odd; fear of night, fear of air.
Fear of hair is chaetophobia. Eleutherophobia’s fear of freedom.
There’s First Encounter Assault Recon,
‘a survival horror first person shooter, developed
by Monolith Productions and published by Vivendi’,
a video game, a generation’s modus vivendi, a way of living
in which we agree to disagree violently.
Ephebiphobia is the fear of teenagers; melanophobia,
fear of the color black; caligynephobia,
the fear of beautiful women; and anthrophobia, fear
of flowers. You can spend hours on a list like this.
Pantophobia is the fear of everything. After two-
hundred-thirty-odd years the republic crawls
through its slow-motion youth, democracy requiring not
only equality but a vast sameness many fear,
as some fear guns and others fear their guns
will be taken away, their beautiful guns,
poetry in them, shining assemblages of articulate parts
in which ammo is the main idea. Consider the idea
that a thing can be beyond perfection, as in a more perfect
union, as in the sky and its endlessness
—astrophobia, that’s called, the fear of stars
and celestial space. As for fear of oblivion,
there is no word for it. Come home late, Robert Frost
rattled the key in the lock and left the door open
until a light was on, a way of allowing what was inside out.
Later, on his farmhouse porch, Frost trembling,
frightened of the dark, a shotgun in his hands. He thought
he could talk Khrushchev into nuclear disarmament
(nucleomituphobia, bomb fear) and sulked because
JFK didn’t call him back. The fear of poetry
is metrophobia, and melophobes fear music, cringing
at the ballgame through ‘God Bless America.’
Regarding the disaffected, the OED suggests they lack
first of all affection. Put that with logophobia,
the fear of words, and philophobia, the fear of love.
Parthenophobia is the fear of virgin girls. WTF
is internet slang and the initials of the World Taekwondo
Federation, member of the International Olympic Committee.
Why is there is no word for the fear of committees,
which are so much to be feared? Fear of Germany
is Teutophobia. Vestiphobia is the fear of clothing.
The fear of flags is vexiphobia. On American Fear’s
logo, you can find the flag’s stripes resembling a bar code.
Gringophobia is the fear of Americans, the ones
who fear America ends far north of Tierra del Fuego.
Fear of a white god is leukotheophobia. A snowclone
is a ‘cliché or phrasal template, multi-use, customisable,
instantly recognisable, time-worn and open
to an array of variants’: as in What Would Henry Ford Do?
American Fear’s bestselling design:
a mandible-less skull enwreathed by bullets, bunting,
and feathers, on a base of Fifties-befinned bombs.
There is no word for the fear of growing up,
though gerascophobia is the fear
of growing old, and old men fear not
how others might read them by their clothes.
Kings wear robes and senators wear suits. The word senator
comes from the Latin senex, meaning old man,
and gerontophobia is the fear of old people.
Chronophobia is the fear of time.
Some old men do not wear T-shirts,
because putting one can be exhausting
and taking it off worse. Imagine fearing a shirt.
Why is there a word like bathysiderodromophobia?
Subways are beautiful in their tunnels and troughs,
their soiled, palatial stations. ‘Go in fear of abstractions,’
Pound said. He suffered not from metrophobia,
but from madness. To fear in Italian is temere.
‘What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross,’
wrote Pound. ‘Better to go down dignified
with boughten friendship at your side than none at all,’
wrote Frost. He had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Among American Fear’s other shirt designs, one called
‘Your Pretty Death Bed’, a young woman,
her wrists slashed, looking asleep and covered
by the stars and stripes. There is no word
for the fear our daughters will commit suicide
beneath a patriotic blanket. Robert Frost’s son, Carol,
shot himself with a deer rifle on October 9, 1940.
‘I took the wrong way with him,’ wrote Frost,
who would outlive all but two of his six children.
A citizen opposes the reintroduction of gray wolves
to the American wilderness, because they are Canadian,
as though they might harbor within their genes
a disinclination for revolution and a soft spot
for the queen. Freddie Mercury was a gay British genius
and homophobic sports teams all across the nation sing his
‘We Are the Champions.’ He’s number 50
among the 100 Greatest Britons, four slots ahead
of George Harrison, twelve ahead of Jane Austen
and a whopping twenty-three in front of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Ronald Reagan is number one on the American list.
The only poet in the top twenty-five is Muhammad Ali,
who comes in just above Rosa Parks but well behind
Elvis, whose pelvis was censored from the television screen.
No word for the fear of free speech,
but a man was not allowed to board a flight at JFK
because his T-shirt, in Arabic and English, read
‘We will not be silent.’ American Fear’s shirts
will not alarm the Transportation Security Administration,
also called the TSA. The fear of silence is sedatephobia.
The TSA is also the Tourette Syndrome Association,
and based on Boswell’s descriptions it is theorised
that Samuel Johnson suffered from the malady,
making frequent odd grunts and muttering
under his breath ‘too, too, too’, meaning also
and yes and more, meaning many,
meaning he meant to know all the words,
and the problem with all is everything. All men, all words,
all fears. This beautiful, fearful,
and fearsome country, such as it is,
such as it might yet, someday, become.