Drunken parties, pentagrams and heavy metal headbanging: a typical American suburb in 1986? Nope, Cairo in 1997.

it's easy to dismiss the cultural paranoia of others as a kind of joke. When Iranian mullahs denounce the U.S. as the "Great Satan," or declare innocent-looking Barbie dolls to be "satanic" toys whose "unwholesome flexibility ... destructive beauty and ... semi-nudity" can corrupt even the most innocent Iranian toddler, it's hard not to laugh. How could anyone think a Barbie doll could lead a kid to depravity? And even if a few kids strip their dolls naked and play house with Barbie and Ken (or even Barbie and Barbie), what's the harm in that? Who hasn't snuck a peek at Barbie's mutant breast formation?

The trouble is, of course, that most kinds of cultural paranoia aren't quite as alien as they first appear. After all, I've heard otherwise sensible feminists denounce Barbies with all the fervor of an angry mullah -- not for corrupting the morals of young girls but for encouraging a ditzy retrograde femininity. (I mean, her feet are designed to wear nothing but high heels!) And friends of mine have actually blockaded department stores in campaigns against G.I. Joe and other "war toys." If the Iranian mullahs could laugh, they might well laugh at that.

Over the last few weeks, a distressingly familiar form of cultural paranoia has erupted in Egypt: The police and the press in Cairo have launched a kind of war on Egyptian heavy-metal fans. In a series of pre-dawn raids on Jan. 22, police rounded up several dozen rebellious, black-clothes-wearing Cairo teens, accusing them of "spreading extremist ideas, scorning religion, harming national unity and social peace." The kids, many of them coming from wealthy, Westernized families, were said to be organizing weird drunken parties that degenerated into full-scale satanic orgies, complete with blood-drinking and ritual animal slaughter. One Egyptian newspaper accused Israel's Mossad of "orchestrating" the orgies; a weekly magazine screamed that this foul "Devil Worship" was "made in America and exported by Israel."

If the events in Egypt bring an ironic smile to any American's face, it's only because the Egyptians are so far behind the curve. Heavy metal? That is so 10 years ago, so trite, so tacky, so trailer-park.

I mean, if the Egyptians want to do Satanic Panic the American way, they should at least pick a reasonable target -- you know, like Marilyn Manson. At this very moment, in our enlightened country, he's got a whole Satanic Panic going all by himself, inspiring students, teachers and politicians from Fitchburg, Mass., to Omaha, Neb., to demand that Mr. Manson take his terrible nasty music somewhere else. I mean, it's bad enough that his icky videos are repeated on MTV approximately every minute and a half. We just don't want him dripping his blood and pus and whatever else that is all over him in our town. And none of that devil-worship, neither.

From here, the campaign against Marilyn Manson seems nearly as anachronistic as the Egyptian campaign against heavy metal. These days, after all, young American Jesus freaks aren't burning rock records like they used to do. They're forming astonishingly lifelike "alternative" bands like Jars of Clay and getting themselves into heavy rotation on MTV. And Marilyn Manson's satanic creepiness is so obviously shtick it's hard to see how anyone could get so worked up about it. Let's face it: Satanic Panic is passe.

Or is it? After all, America's real Satanic Panic in the 1980s and early 1990s had less to do with Ozzy Osbourne than with alleged "satanic ritual abuse" in day-care centers -- a scare that left scores of innocent people rotting in jail, convicted not on the basis of physical evidence but of hazy "memories" elicited, often under pressure, from suggestible children. (A 1994 survey, conducted by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect and costing taxpayers some $750,000 over five years, examined over 12,000 accusations of ritual abuse, finding no physical evidence to back up any of them.)

There's a growing consensus that the "ritual abuse" scare reflected a kind of collective delusion, fomented by overzealous investigators, stubbornly dogmatic therapists and a credulous press. The often bizarre accusations bandied about in such cases were all too easily believed by parents already feeling guilty about leaving their young children in the hands of others.

It's worth noting that this scare was an almost entirely North American phenomenon. In England, the press has looked upon the panic and its aftermath with the kind of bemusement with which we Americans regard the mullahs' campaigns against Barbie. The recent arrival in Britain of the controversial Canadian "recovered memory" expert Colin Ross elicited a strongly skeptical story in London's Daily Telegraph -- noting with almost palpable amusement that Ross is convinced he's the victim of a vast CIA plot to discredit his work helping patients recover memories of secret government brainwashing à la "The X-Files."

Still, while the American press has grown more skeptical of outlandish ritual abuse charges over the past several years, it hasn't attempted to deal in any serious way with its complicity in the original child-abuse scares. Many of the assumptions that led to the original abuse hysteria linger on. And a surprising number of the "experts" responsible for the scares in the first place continue their careers, mostly unruffled, as therapists and social workers -- convincing a new generation of patients that all their troubles stem from forgotten childhood episodes of ritual abuse, many of them as elaborate and fanciful as the stories told to persistent investigators by impressionable kids in the day-care cases. And though courts have been overturning "ritual abuse" convictions one by one, quite a few of the alleged abusers remain in jail.

If our Satanic Panic has receded, it's hardly vanished. And you don't have to be too terribly paranoid to think that a new outburst of hysteria could arise at the slightest provocation -- people are willing to believe the strangest things about John F. Kennedy, Vincent Foster and TWA Flight 800. We habitually scorn the seemingly irrational anxieties and superstitions of others without acknowledging our own. These sorts of "moral panics" are inevitable in societies caught up in vast changes that they don't -- and can't -- understand. And there's a certain logic behind it all. The Egyptians, for their part, are clearly less worried by Satan than they are by the Great Satan. For Egyptian fundamentalists terrified of the Westernization of their country, rich kids listening to devilish music make perfect targets.

As for us here in the Belly of the Great Satanic Beast, we've got our own worries -- and we'll panic as often and as boisterously as we damn well please.
Feb. 14, 1997