Connect: "This is not a drill, this is not a drill," police and security men shouted as they cleared Washington's Capitol Hill, White House, treasury department, supreme court and other government buildings on Wednesday. On television the panic looked sad, pathetic and absurd.
Mind you, the running crowd also seemed funny, like the conclusion to a typically eccentric Mel Brooks' film.
More pertinently however, it was instructive. A Cessna light aircraft - a vehicle lighter than many of the hideous SUVs on American (or even Irish!) roads - had entered restricted airspace. It allegedly re-invoked visions of September 11th, 2001, when huge passenger jets were commandeered and crashed into New York's World Trade Centre and Washington's Pentagon.
The incident was reported as though an invading housefly would automatically bring back memories of a previous attack by four ultra-aggressive eagles. It lacked all proportion. (What, for instance, might the Cessna have done that made it safer to be on the street than in a massive stone building? Some kind of concrete-piercing chemical or biological attack perhaps? Who knows?)
Sure, anybody caught up in Wednesday's alert would feel frightened. As people paid to protect the public shouted "this is not a drill, this is not a drill" and caused mass panic, it would be impossible to remain unconcerned. (The "Hamlet cigar moment" would be elusive.) The energy of a panic-stricken crowd would naturally generate alarm in even the calmest and most sanguine of people.
And yet, and yet . . . though the conventional wisdom that it's "better to be safe than sorry" prevails, it's wearing thin. There have been too many scares - Saddam Hussein's 45-minute primer for Armageddon, anthrax, dirty bombs, suitcase nukes, bridges and tunnels under threat, 'red alerts', 'chatter' (chatter?) allegedly intercepted, street drills for attacks with chemical weapons and so on.
Who is benefiting from all this? A government certainly has a duty to protect its population. That's why voters allow politicians to control a state's most awesome firepower. Yet a population utterly trusting its government must be considered naive, gullible or desperate. What must all the ridiculous alerts in the US be doing to power and trust relations between citizens and politicians? Those issuing the alerts will insist that they can't afford to be wrong once because a catastrophe might befall the civilian population. But even with goodwill and perhaps a visceral degree of 'patriotism', people to whom these alerts are too frequently issued have got to wonder sometimes. The constancy of maintaining fear among the population inevitably erodes trust.
Radio listeners or news channel viewers will not have been surprised at the outcome of the Washington panic. Certainly, there will have been (for all but particularly sick puppies) relief that nobody was killed or hurt. But inevitably there's growing cynicism about these alerts now. Indeed, the spectacle of hundreds of people running like sheep in the US capital had an eerie symbolism.
In fact, that symbolism was more alarming than the Cessna. Here was a day in which people looked like scared sheep in Washington while more than 70 other people were slaughtered in Iraq. In the two weeks since the formation of a Shia-led government in Iraq, where Washington remains the master, more than 400 people have been killed there.
For them, bomb attacks were certainly not a drill. They were real and deadly and they will continue. In light of that fact, how must Washington runners feel? Certainly they could be expected to feel lucky that the 'non-drill' was a 'non-event'.
Perhaps they feel grateful that their government cares so much for their security. But perhaps they feel duped.
They probably feel a mixture of all these things but as the memory of the 2001 attack on the United States fades, more and more people will inevitably feel duped. They are likely too to feel that too often they have been treated like sheep and if they begin to attack their appallingly awful media that have facilitated the shepherding, so much the better.
On such a bloody day in Iraq, the Washington panic looked like orchestrated obscenity. Clearly, it suits the Washington government to keep Americans frightened and the Bush administration will hope to be the main beneficaries from doing so.
Meanwhile the slaughter continues in Iraq.
Does anybody, for instance, remember the alleged anthrax threat to Enniscorthy? There was another to Castlepollard. Think on these things: Enniscorthy and Castlepollard (and other Irish towns, no doubt) being targeted by anthrax terrorists. Are people embarrassed by the memory or is the idiocy considered to have been just a frisson of excitement in a dull world?
Like Wednesday's panic in Washington, the Irish anthrax codology is not only daft but instructive. It was made plausible to enough people because of the mood prevailing at the time. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, 2001, people were terrified.
In the US power keeps them terrified. Still, even there, the fable of the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' must be strengthening. Good.