Last week the Washington Post reported on the lack of planning for burying the dead in the event of a pandemic of bird flu or some other deadly disease. The article makes the sound point that, while nobody wants to consider these kinds of details, somebody had better do so. But it acquires the familiar odor of Washington bureaucratic infighting in this paragraph:

“Noticeably absent from the discussion” at Fort Monroe were representatives of the Department of Homeland Security, even though they will have overall coordinating responsibility in a pandemic, said [John] Fitch [senior vice president for advocacy at the National Funeral Directors Association]. “Right now, there is no single agency or individual responsible for mass fatalities.”

That last statement strikes me as odd. Do I want there to be a “single agency or individual responsible for mass fatalities”? The Mass Fatalities Agency (known as the MFA, of course, a terminal degree), or perhaps the Bureau of the Dead (BoD)?

Of course, as that paragraph suggests, we already have an agency for this kind of thing. Mr. Fitch’s only complaint is that this agency doesn’t (yet) have an undersecretary for mortuary affairs. But the agency itself is worth considering for what it says about American hopes and (mostly) fears these days.

We are insecure. Afraid of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, droughts. Avian flu, West Nile virus, computer viruses, high cholesterol from eggs, Alzheimer’s from Coke cans. Child molesters, abductors of blondes, identity thieves. Terrorists, fanatics, WMDs, exploding shoes.

Just after 9/11, when our fear was at a peak, our representatives in Washington created the Department of Homeland Security. The idea was to tie together all of the protective agencies in government and add some extra bits so we could all be more, well, secure in our homeland.

The phrase “Homeland Security” itself has some major problems, of course. (Though it’s not as bad as its contemporary, the “USA Patriot Act,” about which David Rees deadpanned, “Always remember, adults named it that.”) The “homeland” part strikes me as un-American and wrongheaded — too much like the racial/national “Motherland” and “Fatherland” constructs of 19th-century Europe. You know, the kind of thing that brought you such hits as World War I, fascism, and ethnic cleansing.

“Security” too has its problems. On the one hand the word has ominous resonances with the KGB, the “Committee of State Security” (literally, the Russian word here beaks down to “without-danger-ness”) that made “security” a euphemism for control and repression in the name of preserving a regime. One is neither heartened nor surprised to hear of some foreign government’s “security services” taking action against uppity citizens.

On the other hand, “security” is too nebulous, promising something it can’t deliver — a state free of danger. In this sense, the term is similar to “terrorism” (or “terror,” its hysterical abbreviation) as a symptom of our perverted public discourse. Just as “terrorism” is applied to everything from the activities of law students opposed to the ban on gays in the military to the actions of fighters in Iraq who in any previous war would have been known as insurgents, guerillas, or rebels, so is “security” invoked to pander to the panicked, assuring them that the government can keep them safely cocooned from the world’s many dangers as they might imagine them.

Compare the term “homeland security” to another option that was apparently too retro for 21st-century use, “civil defense.” “Civil” avoids the cornpone nationalism of “homeland,” and “defense” has the advantage of specificity. There is an enemy, we will defend ourselves (our civil order) against it, and if we manage that we’ll have been successful. “Security,” being an ongoing state, suggests the probability that a perpetual effort will be needed to achieve or maintain it. And anyway, with all the dangers in the world — Oxycontin, killer bees — can you ever really be secure?

Luckily for those in power, security is one of those concepts with an appearance/reality equivocation. There’s actually being secure, and then there’s feeling secure, and most Americans these days prefer the latter and don’t pay much attention to the former (in the same way most of them like to feel saved rather than actually being Christian in any sense of the word that might require much of them). This is good for the people who run things because they can simply redraw some org charts, put scary-looking guys with semiautomatic weapons in subways, and make us take off our shoes at airports — and most people will feel safer, at least until a hurricane hits and the levees turn out to be, well, maybe not quite up to code.

Around the country, millions of people buy hand soap infused with triclosan or triclocarbon, ingredients that kill bacteria. That’s a good thing, you would think, because bacteria are the disease-causing things that you want to get rid of by washing your hands. It turns out, though, that triclosan and triclocarbon only kill bacteria when they’re in contact with a surface for two minutes or more, and most hand washing happens much quicker. But hand washing still works, because the soap (never mind the triclosan) does what soap has always done and cleans people’s hands, washing the bacteria away. We feel more secure because of the triclosan, even though it’s the same old soap that’s keeping us from getting sick. Of course, it turns out that using triclosan in everyday products probably breeds resistant strains of bacteria, making us all more vulnerable in the long run.

The intensity of our national insecurities these days resembles the germophobia that has led to this bizarre love of antibacterial soap. The security most people want seems to be an impregnable fortress kind of thing, like a panic room but with a nice lawn and a good school district. There’s a “germ theory of homeland security” currently at work, especially prominent these days in the irrational intensity of the right in the current immigration debate (and even in the terms of the debate itself). One gets the impression that covering the Mexican border with Neosporin and antiseptic gauze might be the only way to stop the deadly brown menace from infecting the host.

In the face of this deep-seated and very middle-class fear (Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein dismissed the fear of death as “petit bourgeois”), I say fine, let’s create a Directorate of Emergency Avian Deaths (DEAD) within the Department of Homeland Security. Who knows, it might even be a genuinely effective organization (though the recent history of FEMA, one of DHS’s several dozen component agencies, doesn’t inspire confidence). But at some point, this has to stop. We have to admit that life is inherently risky, that we all cash it in in the end, that the government should protect us from what it can reasonably protect us from and not promise anything more, and that maybe security — the feeling or even the reality — shouldn’t be our highest civic value.