March, 2009:
It’s a good “news day” when…
1) The pope does a youth rally and 2 kids are stampeded to death, resulting in pictures of the Pontiff kissing kids on the cheek and making promises to visit the injured.
I use a news aggregating service called Newser. http://www.newser.com/ Aside from being a testimonial to how condensed information delivery and receipt has become, it is a barometer for what makes newsworthy content. I started using Newser as a kind of methadone for the news. It is a cute little widget that sits on my IGoogle front page and radically reduces the amount of space dedicated to national and world news. Now, I get all the news in tiny little snippets. A picture gallery with a one or two line description. I can click for a little more, or just take a pass. Usually I would take a pass on a picture of the Pope kissing babies. That’s an important part of the Pope gig. But the picture of the Pontiff kissing babies with a headline: ” Two teens die in Pope stampede” compels me to blog.
You have to wonder about the veracity of a news site that would sensationalize such a minor event in the big scope of things. When the Pope does a rally for 30,000 youth in Angola the fact that a couple of them were killed, and a few are hospitalized; isn’t this just the capital damage to be expected? Yes, I too wish there was a word in the English language that was larger or more potent then “facetious” to describe my last remark. Let’s call it uber-facetious. And yes, it was meant to be.
Realizing that a news service called “Newser” might lack the necessary journalistic credentials to warrant raising my hackles; I immediately went to the front page of the New York Times, a paper whose credibility is slightly less questionable. There I found a headline: ” Pope Tells Clergy in Angola to Work Against Belief in Witchcraft”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/world/africa/22pope.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
At the end of the very newsy article, replete with interviews and human rights angles, way down at the very bottom of the NYTimes page, was printed, as a tag to the very same article, almost like an afterthought:
2 Reported Killed in Stampede
LUANDA, Angola (AP) — The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that two people were trampled to death in a stampede at a sports stadium on Saturday, before Pope Benedict XVI addressed young people.
LUSA cited an unidentified source at a local hospital as saying a man and woman were dead on arrival. The agency said eight other people had been hospitalized with minor injuries.
It was almost like the author of the story didn’t include this little tidbit of information thinking it un-newsworthy. Then at the last minute a copy boy rushed up to his/her desk and gave them a tear sheet off the wire….2 reported killed in stampede.
WWJD? Our individual speculations on the answer to that question may vary. What I am pretty sure of, had the sermon on the mount resulted in the stampeding death of two innocents; he would have pledged to do a little more than visit the survivors in the hospital and give them each a magic decoder ring.
Here’s hoping that some Catholic passerby reads this posting and draws arms. Go for it. Please. Pretty please.
…or I’ll give you something to cry about….
I know that I am not the only one who wakes up in the wee hours with something on my mind. I suspect however that I may be the only biped who wakes up thinking about paradox. This morning, it was 12:30 when I craned my neck to look over the sleeping body of my darling wife to blearily peek at the alarm clock. The paradox that roused me to semi-consciousness was an echo from childhood. It went something like this: “Young man, if you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.”
First, I wondered how this phrase, this statement made it’s way into my memory. I had this vague memory of being in a store of some kind. I was small enough that I was still being led everywhere by an adult hand. In my mind’s eye it was like a scene watched from above. I could see my little self, hand being held, listening to the odd command: “Young man, if you don’t stop that crying I’m going to give you something to cry about”. Truly weird.
In my adult mind, after waking up and after sufficient half/caf in my blood, I pondered whether I had ever used this bizarre strategy with my own children. I came to the conclusion that while I had certainly committed atrocities of my own during the rearing of my offspring; this was one that I felt confident that I have never used. Somehow I had avoided the dreaded “sins of the father” bullet this one time.
Next I pondered the paradox itself. How I wished to be returned to the exact moment in time when I first encountered the great paradox. Oh how I longed to enter the wayback machine with Sherman and go back to the very moment, but with my adult vocabulary and faculties, my fifty year old sensibilities and facility. I can almost see myself looking up into the parent’s eyes and saying: “Wait, let’s think about this with some ration of common sense. If indeed I had nothing currently compelling me to exhibit this emotion, I would not be crying. So, while I appreciate your offer to compound my misery so that my crying might be even more heartfelt; perhaps the better solution would be for us to discuss the true nature of my disturbance to see if we can find the root source of my anguish.”
Oh, that would have been sweet. I can even imagine my parent’s face. Stunned. Absolute logic from a three year old. And while it probably never happens, I hold out hope that in this modern world, some day some parent will dredge out this tired old paradox with the three year old that has the exact vocabulary to challenge them. When that happens, the world will change – instantaneously. The garden will be restored.
Of course I understand it will occur on the same day that the AIG executives return the bonuses. But I can dream.
A bejeeber free zone
There are some things that I am good at – by my own account. Others who’s opinion of me is good have weighed in – agreeing with my position on myself. They are allowed to have a high degree of credibility. Despite my high opinion of myself I must admit that there are things that I simply don’t shine at. In fact there are activities when compared and contrasted to the prowess of others; my skills are paler than my skin color.
I learned this morning that blogging is one of those activities. Now this is not to say that the Trifling Blog is not a worthwhile read (at least for the author), but I happened on the Euripides of bloggers this morning, and compared to his craftsmanship and the complexity of his bogification (blog-a-factsione in Italian) my writing truly pales. One could think of my blogging like an average day in Dayton Ohio.
Oh what a dizzying fall it was, to have met terminal velocity falling off my own pedestal. The ground was not in the slightest bit yielding. Everything about this Epiphonic moment was harsh and cruel, cold, calloused and a whole bunch of other words. In short it scared the bejeebers out of me.
As is often the case, inside the pain was a lesson. A lesson about gravity, a lesson about falling and a lesson about the very nature of blogging and what makes it compelling. It seems that it is not just the writing of the blog that is important. It is about the heat created when you attract regular commentators who are dedicated to proving you wrong on all counts. This is where the feathers really start to fly, where the dust is kicked up. It’s better than Micky Roarke in the Wrestler. Better than Afro Samurai.
Blogging in its purest form is a shit storm. The real professionals wear pajamas all day. They live in glass houses and they surround themselves with piles of “skippers” these are the stones that we collected as kids that “skip” when you frizbee them across the water. The real-deal professional bloggers skip a stone across their blog and wait for the ripples. Pretty soon the kids on the other side of the lake start skipping stones back.
Substance only counts for minor points. This is an important concept. An hour into reading this blog dealing with some fairly topical and potent political material, I realized that no mention had been made for almost 20 minutes of the topic at all. Rather, it became a stone throwing contest over the use of a single word in the language. The word was “impish”. So was the dialogue.
Salvo after salvo, personal assault after personal assault, thinly veiled insult after thinly veiled insult. God it was fun reading. I felt so morally superior to all of them. Me and my little blog that nobody reads.
It was at this moment that I decided to create an alter ego for myself, so that I could aggregiously comment on my own blog. Taking the opposing point of view on any subject, and calling myself all kinds of names.
So in conclusion, I look forward to the ongoing dialogue with myself. I can only hope that I don’t loose the argument. I hope I will continue to learn from the masters. Perhaps one day I can wear my P.J.’s all day and smell of cigars and sardines (I made that last part up).
Perhaps one day….I will arrive.
Depressing News…
That’s it, there is nothing to follow.
The title of this post is a statement not a sign pointing to some larger truth. It is in fact the only partial truth that matters. Succinctly: The News is Depressing. I’m not talking about normal every day depressing news like the kind we used to get back in the day. Sure, the news used to be depressing, sometimes sensational, but almost always deep down at its core….the very nature of the news has been deeply depressing as of late. About all we can do it to poke fun at it. We can place our thumb to our nose as we pass it by on the street, or make some equally disdainful gesture to it.
Who cares about Bernie Madhoff? Well, actually a lot of people do. Who cares what Rush Limbaugh has to say? Again, about 20 million people a day. I repeat: The News is depressing.
Systems seek equilibrium especially human systems. They have a tendency to “right” themselves like ships on the water. They may list from side to side, from time to time, but eventually they either right themselves or they sink. Continuously reporting on the sway doesn’t do much to influence the result. Except of course to cause grief to the reader/listener.
We are drawn to it though aren’t we?. I dare say that there is something deep down inside us that likes the pain, longs for the suffering, wants to have our noses rubbed in the cultural excrement as twer. So much more is the pity. So what is the answer? Stop reading the news? Perhaps. Even better, take the position to not contribute to the unrest. Next time you hear or see a piece of bad-to-terrible news, don’t tweet it, don’t dig it, don’t blog it, don’t do anything at all with it. In fact, when you read it simply accept it as inert. It is just news. And in this time and place, if it ain’t good news, we are all a lot better off if we don’t spread it around like the flu. Fur deiner Gasuntheit.