If you ever feel like you are being relentlessly pummeled by the 7/24 news cycle, it's worth stepping back and considering what you might do about it. One option that some choose is to check out altogether. Believe me, even as a career journalist, I understand that impulse.
I've even heard various doctors and psychologists advocate "non-news" days as good for your mental health. I beg to disagree. But, of course, for me, as a news junkie, that kind of advice is irrelevant. Just like other addictions, my compulsion to feel informed trumps any other concern.
I'll do most anything to get my daily fix.
In any event, this tsunami of news has been ushered in by numerous technologies -- cable television, the Internet, cell phones -- not to mention the needs of our newly interlocked global information economy.
And, whatever else happens, we won't be going backward to any version of the "good old days."
What we all need, collectively, is help. We all need to know less about Anna Nicole Smith and more about the continuing chaos that engulfs Biloxi and New Orleans and the rest of our ruined Gulf Coast.
We probably could know a whole lot less about celebrities who shave their heads and run away from rehab; and much, much more about the reasons we won't be getting universal health insurance any time soon.
How can we bring this about? Stay tuned, I am developing some suggestions: Dr. Weir's Healthy News Diet For Addicts.
As of tonight, my lab assistants and I are still mired in our research, but we will have a 12-step plan soon, don't you worry.
***
As everyone who knows me at all knows, I love baseball. Tonight is an exciting night here in San Francisco. Our Giants started the season at home 0-2. But there were tantalizing hints that our controversial superstar, Barry Bonds, is back close to being the athlete he was three years ago, even as he is reaching the very end of his career.
The evidence?
In the very first inning of the very first game of this season, Bonds singled and then stole second base. This in itself was remarkable, because Bonds stopped stealing bases years ago. But he is the only player in baseball history to both hit 500 home runs and steal 500 bases. Still, few men can still steal bases in their forties, after lots of leg injuries.
Bonds was sending a message.
Game two, first inning. Bonds hits a long home run, and he now is only 20 behind Hank Aaron for the record so many people hope he won't break, the all-time career HRs (755). Later he races far across the field to make a great running catch of a fly ball, the kind of play he was incapable of making the past two injury-plagued seasons.
Still, the Giants lost those games.
Tonight, in the first inning (pretty soon, opposing coaches will start walking him again), Bonds again smashed a tremendous drive out to center field. In any other park in baseball, literally, this would have been a home run. In the park by the Bay, it hit the wall sign (421 feet) for a long double, driving in the first run of the game.
The Giants eventually won, 5-3.
***
My lowly Mud Lake Mafia had a great day, too. I won't bore you with the numbers, but they are tantalizing to a math junkie who enjoys the patterns in a game of percentages. Plus, so far as I know, there are no recovery programs for math junkies. Rather than pathologizing this particular group of addicts, we as a society has chosen to crown them as geniuses.
That's nice, but only because most folks don't grasp basic arithmetic, yet they all think they know a loser when they see one, i.e., a drunk, an addict, a crazy person.
***
In baseball, there is a condition known as "defensive indifference." I love this phrase, much as I love the medical diagnosis of "referred pain," which I have written about before. In baseball, this is the label given the situation where a man steals a base and the defense doesn't even try to stop him from doing so.
Sort of like when an occupying army stands by and does not interfere when an angry mob ransacks the former residence of an oppressive ruler, eh?
"Defensive indifference." I love how that phrase rings.
Because that is how I feel when somebody I thought was a friend suddenly drops me like a hot potato. In this alienated, isolated, fragmented society of ours, many are "driven to a frenzy," in Lenin's words, describing the petite bourgeois , and their descent into absurd nothingnessous.
***
My main interest in the continuing evolution of journalism at this point is what will happen to the "externalities," as it were; those stories left behind in the wake of a global 7/24 news cycle that devours each story as if it mattered, and then moves on, confirming that it didn't, leaving the rest of us grasping for meaning that never comes...
The absolute best example of this is the media coverage of the post-Katrina recovery, which, according to my best source, is in fact a non-recovery.
Thus, a noisy Hegelian news cycle lurches out of control, as if powered by robots, while most of us yearn for a human synthesis -- a connection we can feel.
Unfortunately, robots do not have any feelings. And those who reject our atempts to connect as warm bodies act as if they were robots, denying their own emotions, to the detriment of us all.
-30-
(*- ...You're gonna work for us someday.) This refers to a famous chant by Northwestern football fans as they, year after year, witnessed their Wildcats slaughtered by teams like the Michigan State Spartans. My use of this here means I do not accept the beating some "friends" would deliver to me, because I know they will eventually regret it -- because the heart never lies. Plus, by then it will be too late. I'll be gone.)
No comments:
Post a Comment