I didn't see the Obama Tucson eulogy thingy speech. I heard it was very nice. Or the fatuous brayings of a dead-souled charlatan molesting the corpses of the slain to jiggle free the directed aura of Klieg lights and the affections of the unblinking electric eye. One of those two things. I've seen it described both ways.
I didn't watch the Sarah Palin response thing either. Partly that's because I still can't fathom why I should give a shit what her position may be, on this or anything else. I have a list of reality/non-scripted television personalities I would seek out for guidance on any number of issues sorted by order of importance and I'd have to say she ranks somewhere south of Anthony Bourdain, Andy Richter, Jeff Probst and most of the cast of Jersey Shore.
I just don't have the energy to see this, as everything else since at least 2000 but probably 1992, devolve into the charge/countercharge incest-infused slap-fight called Seize the News Cycle. It's almost impossible for me to imagine engaging in any way on any level with this whole assassination business without being speckled with the vomit-splatter of 21st century American pop-culture political discourse.
It's not that it makes me sad. It's that it makes me exhausted. Even before I engage. So so weary.
And yes, OK, part of the problem is that I know if I start digging in too deeply, at the bottom of this pile of refuse and detritus, there's a murdered nine-year-old girl, a fact I'd rather pretend doesn't exist. It's an incovenient horror that stands out as a sharp-edged silhouette of reality against the rampaging white-out of manufactured political noise. The wholeness of it, its inescapability, it's root-level mortal truth invokes more than a pang of Sartrean nausea. I find it difficult to even construct an intellectual framework to express any of it as the first spun-sugar lattices shatter with the screeched compression-wave shout THIS IS WHAT MATTERS.
It doesn't help that I'm the father of a nine-year-old myself. And a recently former nine-year-old. And a nine-year-old-to-eventually-be. So like Sarah Palin, I choose to take this inadequately-named tragedy and make it all about me and my reaction. Here on the Thursday following, it's all a bit much for me, I admit it. Out there somewhere there is context and reason. For now the Daleks have appeared and I choose to hide behind the sofa.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
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2 comments:
re: S. Palin: "that's because I still can't fathom why I should give a shit what her position may be, on this or anything else."
Ditto. rAmen. The sooner she falls into oblivion, the better.
As always, you get it just right - the media & co seemed, very very very quickly, to forget that an actual dead little girl was there behind all their yapping and sound-biting and "analysis." As did the people - evidently none of whom had ever been told to act like they'd been somewhere - who attended Obama's speech in Arizona. Pretty sure that cheers and whoops were TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE in that situation.
Again, I heard about the whoops and... nope, just can't. It's the Paul Wellstone funeral thing all over again. Am I the only one who hates reruns?
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