Fire and Knowledge

Frederica Mathewes-Green has a good article over at BeliefNet entitled When All We Can Do Is Watch. Here is an excerpt:

When Neil Postman published his epoch-making book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1984, he called the relevant chapter, “Now… This.”

Those are the little words a television announcer uses when moving from one story to the next, and Postman proposes that they constitute a grammatical innovation: if a conjunction joins things, “Now… this” not only separates them but establishes a bright line of irrelevance. The words, Postman says, “indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see.” No news can be so miserable, titillating, or alarming that it can’t be briskly erased, and the way cleared for something new.

Postman would have felt vindicated by the main page on AOL the morning I left. It showed a closeup photo of a distraught young man with dark brown skin, his head cradled in one hand and tears streaming down his face. The headline read (if memory’s correct), “70,000 Feared Dead.”

But below that there were several other news stories. After all the tsunami wasn’t the only thing happening in the world, you can’t think about it all the time. Each had a short headline marked with a bullet point. The last one read: “Holiday Travel Nightmares.”

As an old professor of mine used to say, “Now that’s the point!”

However, she said “Postman would have felt vindicated” when I think he has been vindicated since the day his book was published–before then, if possible. The “look at the thousands dead!” to the “aww, what a cute doggie that was lost!” reaction in 10 seconds has been America’s favorite pastime for decades now. We have 20 seconds of news analysis followed by 5 minutes of commercials (not any one longer than 30 seconds) that have no relation to one another.

Oh, Postman has been vindicated alright.