Becker puts your head in a funny place. Psychoanalysis doesn’t allow for accidents, so everything that happens is either done on purpose or by the return of ideas we’ve imperfectly banished from our awarenesses. It sounds ridiculous until you get on the Internet and start pulling up a few annual U.S. statistics about Becker’s favorite subject. These statistics—I think they err on the side of caution—come from the Centers for Disease Control and a website devoted to iatrogenic [physician-caused] pathology. As a metaphorical exercise, I’ve taken the numbers, divided them by 3,000, and expressed them as World Trade Center Terrorist Act Death Equivalents. So—

It’s enough to send you into a hospital, just thinking about it. But wait—

Makes you think that at least some of the people held at Guantanamo ought to be doctors. Tobacco growers. Bartenders. R.C. Willey TV salesmen.

All told the list adds up to 434 World Trade Center Terrorist Act Death Equivalents, or 1,302,000 deaths in this country every year. These are generally considered to be preventable deaths, and it’s worth considering if the 200 or so billion dollars we’re spending on the Iraq war couldn’t have prevented more of them than the war has.

Of course, we’re dealing with uncertainty in the terrorist arena. A mega-terrorist act, if it involved an ex-Soviet nuclear weapon in a container ship in an American harbor, might get 1.3 million Americans. But it would be hard for terrorists to repeat the act year in and year out. It takes our home-grown variety of death to do that, and it takes our home-grown variety of repression to ignore it.

It’s a chilling example of what we as a country are willing to tolerate—in Becker’s term, deny—in order to focus on a much smaller set of deaths that we devote our attention to not tolerating.

Becker, having died toward the end of his book—the last chapter has kind of a chopped-off ending—isn’t around to give us his opinion, but I think he would say a lack of emotional involvement with the people who die these preventable deaths coupled with intense empathy for terror victims fits his thesis. The 1.3 million are disproportionately sick, old, poor, queer, or uneducated. They’re not as effective a bulwark against dying as were the Lexus-driving, bond-trading, law-clerking, upwardly-moving and very alive young people, who were so secure in their control of their worlds that morning of September 11, 2001.

Their illusions and ours collapsed with the Twin Towers. And much of our politics and foreign policy and military action from that point on has been dedicated to getting those illusions back. We have reelected a man who has promised to keep the cosmos under control and keep death at bay. And that’s batshit crazy.