Like millions of others last night, I spent three hours, off and on, watching a train wreck. The fact that it was news…that it was happening in front of our eyes…that it had become familiar enough that we knew what the “experts” were going to say before they said it…was obscene. News networks have managed to elevate the adrenaline levels on these things while filling airtime with non-information and sticking microphones into shocked and worried faces to demand…”what did you see?” with the ghoulism of “did you see any bodies?”. And all the time we know what they’re doing…They’re being us…They want to see the blood because we want to see the blood…they want to hear the shooting…because we want to hear the shooting. We do. We do because we want to follow it through to the climax…we want to see the bad guys caught or get killed and know that this train wreck is over. Later on we’ll want to know how and why it happened.
We have a horrific reality…not unlike the one in Paris that rips beyond entertainment. The loss of all these lives should not be entertainment. And yet because it is framed within a context in which movies and video games and T.V. portray hyper violence constantly…the format is no longer chilling…it’s familiar and the meaning is rendered “common”. All morning I kept hearing the media in Europe saying “Yet another American shooting” as if “American” is an adjective describing a particular kind of shooting rather than a place where it happened. Yes, there are a lot of them…many more than in any other country but these incidents certainly do happen in other countries.
Under it all you can feel the frustration of all of us…that more of these horror shows are inevitable…That there will be more surveillance, more cameras, more security checks, more police, more people buying and carrying weapons, more words from politicians, more promises, more questions with no real answers, and more drive to find an enemy off-shore to go after. And we’re not stupid people…we know that while there are enemies off shore…there are also people who may live down the street and around the corner. People you may have known for years, grew up with, went to school with, who flip out and start blasting. We certainly know it but we don’t want to think about that.
Because there’s even less that we can do about that than we can do to an off shore enemy. And when it happens we can’t just change the channel and there ain’t no wait a minute.
Chagal4's Blog 
December 4, 2015 at 8:14 pm |
There is a great article in the Nov 30 New Yorker, Letter from Paris, The Long Night: conficting emotions, – problems of integration, fear, being at war, retreat, ‘what to do?’