ABSTRACT
In the United States of America, in the two decades following World War II, panic theory burgeons into a full-blown body of sociological literature, as well as a sustained topic of investigation by the US government and Department of Defense, and a dramatic concern of popular public discourse. The medical research at MGH is sponsored by Upjohn, a transnational pharmaceutical company that manufactures Xanax, a new and widely prescribed drug for panic and anxiety. The pains of being orphaned—this may indeed be a terrifying aspect of the postmodern scene. Better, perhaps, to be sociologically orphaned than mutant members of the new and fleshless family of the corporate mediascape. At least orphans might know the pains of the Historical disappearance of their fleshly parents, just as they may dream of the aboriginal possibility of reconstituting some new and less hierarchical structures of kin.
