(no subject)

The stupidest thing about the news media these days is this absurd overattention to anything remotely related or parallel to stories everyone paid attention to in the recent past. Headlines across the year are becoming a human interest flowchart, each large box spawning ten smaller, which in turn spawn countless tiny ones. Oh yeah, was there another earthquake somewhere near the Indian Ocean? Oh, but no gigantic tsunami this time though? What a relief. What are the odds. Bless us all. And any story whatsoever involving Catholicism is bumped up to at least page two. And we're all doomed to know the name of any (photogenic) suburban teenage girl who goes missing, ever again, apparently. I recall how immediately post-9/11/01 tiny biplane-type crashes, occurring anywhere in the world, and nonfatal ones even, suddenly made the front page of the Columbus Dispatch. It's like we can't remember what the word news might mean abstractly anymore, just the sorts of things recently presented to us as news.

Obviously I use the Polite "we". Paranoia and voyeurism should really, really not be writing our news. If God existed we'd do well to hire Him to come down and once and for all assure "us" that yes, we probably are safe, yes, our children are almost certainly safe, yes, men really can be like that, yes, attractive people are probably naked somewhere, no, we're unlikely to become fabulously wealthy without devoting our life to that exclusive end. The next day we'd get some fucking news.