The Week of July 27, 2007, included Ron Charles' "Potter's success isn't helping other authors": "Despite all the hysteria, the Potter books haven't affected our society's declining interest in books one bit. Today, most high school kids never read for pleasure, and adults aren't much better: More than half won't read a single novel this year. The books that do sell, by and large, are self-help tomes, memoirs about dogs, and poorly written trash."
Despite the kind of "que sera, sera" acceptance Buddhism suggests, I am more interested in the tight webs it insists weave us all together, visibly or not. The disappearance of species and global warming in the ecological tapestry are two instances. At the moment my concern was about classical music, but the real subject keeps being the CPAs pandering to the democratic dregs at the bottom, leading to the general dumbing down, as it is usually called. A blatant example is (T)Videocy, as with news.
Consider the length of the sound bites in your daily, local newscasts. Add them all together. They still do not add up to the information contained in the daily newspaper (I am thinking of our World-Herald), especially when I consider that the first section is national and international, the second is regional and local, and the sports has a whole multipage section too. This doesn't include the business section or, in Omaha, "Living" section, referring to entertainment, the comics, TV programs, eating out, and the like. The poverty of TV newscasts is instantly obvious, not to mention that often the local radio and TV stations here crib their leads from the newspaper.
You can argue about the convenience, a few sentences and a few pictures, saving you all that time, but you cannot claim you're well-informed. You're just illiterate--or, rather, too lazy to read. Otherwise, you'd never trust Fox News on anything about this administration, as its members have traveled back and forth between working for Bush and lying on TV (I don't know that there's a difference), often being caught with factual errors. Instead of being self-satisfied and self-centered, you'd know more about the world in general over a wider spectrum of data from fossil finds to the formally undeclared war in Iraq. You'd cover more news more quickly with your eyes reading the newspaper in approximately the same time than watching the few heavily edited, often emotional sights and sounds of the newscasts.
Is anyone seriously interested, for too obvious examples, in drunken, drugged celebrities? Who cares about Anna Nicole Smith, whoever she was, or the tedious Hilton or Lohan brats or J-Lo's bad temper or Whitney Houston's drug habit or Mel Gibson's drunkenness and bigotry, none of which qualify as news except for malicious and empty lives wallowing in shallow swamps of gossip. I'm to be interested in helicopters following O.J. Simpson's SUV around for days?? That celebrities are products to be sold daily has nothing to do with my world as I live it.
Why am I staring at the house of a victim, a criminal, whomever? Is it an historic site? Did the house have something to do with the accident or death? Yet reporters station themselves at addresses regularly and then thrust rude microphones into stricken faces: How does it feel to find your three-year-old butchered and half eaten? How does it feel to have lost your whole family in the fire? Or, less negatively and more inane than disgustingly shameful, how does it feel to win an Olympic gold medal? How does it feel to be first to the moon? How does it feel to win $74 million in the lottery? I am to waste my time listening to crudely intrusive, trashy interviewers?
A word about that picture being worth a thousand words. Centuries ago in classical Greece, Aristotle, who shaped our Western sciences and philosophy, wrote the Poetics, a very complex treatise on drama and poetry. Of the elements most important to tragedy, the highest dramatic achievement--and with a much different meaning than "very sad" as with auto accidents and losing the farm--plot and character were at the top, spectacle at the very bottom. Gory murders and flashy effects were to be wisely kept from the stage, because they pandered to the base instincts of the audience, the oohs and aahhs rather than the brain. One could see Oedipus with his bleeding eye sockets after he blinded himself with his mother-wife's brooch but not view the act itself, because it was too emotionally distracting. One could see Medea standing over her children murdered by her but not watch her kill them. Meanings, not cheap--or expensive--stage effects.
That could be, should be applied to our visual media generally, but I'll save movies and porn gore for another entry. How wrenching to see horrible accidents and wounded soldiers, and how emotionally manipulating that is. Consider the difference between reading about an event and witnessing the steady diets of catastrophes that pass for newscasts. (Actually much of the most important news, such as the legislation that raises your taxes or keeps you from smoking or brands you as illegal, is done by talking heads of legislators and city councils, no fun to watch at all, downright boring for those of you hyped up on porn gore, though extremely important, especially if done secretly.) That happy newscasts have failed in experiments merely proves Aristotle was right. Spectacle panders to our basest instincts, our strongest emotions. Not reason. How reasonable is your news?
Ah, but it is quick, easy, time-saving, convenient, all those reasons you went to Wal-Mart and killed off the independent businesses and small towns. Well, you get what you pay for, and it's too cheap for me. I want my newspaper, and I hate it when you're too lazy to agree.
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