Least Loved Bedtime Stories v. 2.0

I can’t watch the Katrina coverage anymore. It’s not that the scenes are disturbing. (After living in Miami, home of “Bloody Seven,” the local Fox news channel, nothing can disturb me. The saying went: if there’s a dead body on the street, CBS, NBC, and ABC will discreetly pull back the camera, and Channel 7 will have a close-up of the puddle of blood and the hand poking out from under the yellow plastic sheet.) It’s not even the way they show a few beloved reports over and over and over, 24/7, as if the meaning of “twenty-four hour news” meant “you get to see the same report we first showed at 5am all freaking day, instead of us having to go get more footage of things happening during the actual day.” It’s two other things, and they have infected all of television, so if it wasn’t for Turner Classic Movies and the digital music channels I’d cancel my cable and not miss it. Those two things are: the background music they all use, and the anal retentive, almost obsessive-compulsive attention to trivial detail and nitpicking at the same idea or question over and over until we’re sick of hearing about it, and all done in sloooowwww, kindergarten-teacher-level narration that makes me feel patronized and talked-down-to instead of informed.

The background music (or whatever it’s called — that stuff they play on the introduction to segments and over those video collages of suffering victims and roofs under water and so on) on all the news channels is all of the same kind: sentimental, lugubrious, lachrymose crud that they drag out for every disaster aftermath. It has one purpose: to make us tear up and feel “empathy.” Why it is so important for CNN/MSNBC/Fox News/the Weather Channel/et al to make us cry I have no idea; at some point (probably during the Seventies — every horrible idea that is now SOP in the culture seems to have started during that awful decade) it was decided that it was not enough to have an informed public, one must also have a sobbing, emotionally “involved” mass nervous breakdown. I suspect — though of course I can’t prove it — that as people identified less and less with their customary religious faiths they no longer had churches and deities with which to “suffer as one” with the rest of humanity, but as the need to do so still exists this ersatz pseudo-suffering is what they glom onto instead. (Of course that doesn’t hold for everyone; I’m about as religious as a potato but my motto is still “accept no substitutes”, and I know plenty of religious people who are like Pavlov’s dog to sugary sentiment. But I am not sure there are any “religious” people left, at least in the West, as the world once knew that term; most “religious” people seem to treat their faiths as a lifestyle choice or a political creed these days instead of an entire world view that can’t be “examined” because it would be like taking out their own eyeballs to look at them. This may be why we have so much trouble dealing with Muslims. But I have gone off on a tangent.)

Anyway, the use of the tears ‘n’ slop soundtrack is especially annoying in this context, because there exists a much more apropos musical genre which is readily available at any cd store. But except for a few broadcasts here and there of displaced NOLA jazz musicians playing on Larry King Live and the like it’s as if Mississippi Delta blues, jazz, and zydeco never existed. What do you people think all those sad songs were written about, stuff people made up? Also, it might give a little dignity to the plight of the survivors, and remind people of the good things about New Orleans. There’s a reason that despite the massive corruption, graft, poverty, and general crappiness that ran through the city like mold through bleu cheese there was also quite a bit of that “culture” Our Liberal Betters are always blatting about. But instead we get the theme to “Oprah.”

Speaking of art and culture, I say right now that if you didn’t know that America was going through a cultural and artistic low point that makes the Seventies look like the Italian Renaissance, reading Anne Rice’s infantile screed would remove all doubt. This woman has had exactly one good book: Interview With A Vampire. Otherwise she writes pornographic phonebooks that wouldn’t get published if anyone else came out with them today. But coasting on the reputation of being from a city that has a dark, “glamorous” past gets some people a pass. Here’s another “writer” that for some reason NRO decided to give editorial space to — Quin Hillyer is in high snit:

But readers need to know this: That Mayor Nagin is, or at least was, a good mayor, even if he failed miserably in this most important crucible; that anybody, anybody at all, who defends the response of FEMA and of President Bush in my presence or the presence of any New Orleanian is likely to get punched; that when Dennis Hastert spoke of bulldozing the city he spoke words that can never be forgiven, words that deserved the rebuke from Bill Clinton, who said if he had been in the same room when Hastert said those words that he, Clinton, might have assaulted him.

Oh, I feel a song coming on…

Goin’ down to Louisiana
To Old New Orleans,
Where the women are frantic
And the men are queens…

Drama queens at least. That whole passage reeks of pseudo-macho Southern male writer chest-thrusting. It’s also barely coherent — if one is “trembling” so badly one can barely write, then maybe one is too upset to think clearly, and so therefore should abstain from writing until one is calmer. But that would take self-control of a sort our artistic types are apparently no longer capable of exercising over themselves. In the meantime real men are cleaning up and rescuing people. Mr. Hillyer needs to go into therapy or whatever it is people do today instead of engaging in melodramatic accusations against people that are not only not his enemies, but are in fact trying to help him and his. At least he’s out of the way of the people doing the actual work.

(That’ll get me on his punch list, I guess. I don’t care; because I don’t have the faith in Bush’s and FEMA’s godlike power to make everything all right that they have apparently betrayed I am unable to sympathize never mind empathize with this hyperbole. I wouldn’t be president in this unstable, infant-brained country for anything; sitting in the Oval Office must be like sitting in the middle of a giant nursery, and every baby has a full diaper.)

It all makes me wonder if we’ll get the works of art — the poetry, novels, music — that this catastrophe deserves, or will we get Movies of the Week featuring awful actors picked to a careful racially correct demographic, with an Oprahfied soundtrack featuring violins and sugary female singing, and polemics where the actual events will be turned into a big-eyed puppy that is being kicked by evil white Republican golfers? Oh don’t even answer that: Michael Moore is already fondling the idea of making one of his fakumentaries.

Enough of these people. Back to my disgust with cable news. This is something I only get from the 24 hour news networks, by the way — local news programs are limited to a half an hour or one hour and so must make every minute count. On the other hand, I’m watching one of the cable news channels yesterday, and the news guy (I forget who he is — they’re all interchangeable after a while) is going on and on about the dirty, filthy water full of filth, sewage, dead-body-stuff, alligator piss (okay, that one I made up), and did they mention filth? And a “cholera-like” bacteria that will kill you, but it’s not contagious, or something… and then he said it over again, and the camera panned up and down the dirty street, and stopped for a while on a canted-over streetlight (he must have been standing on Canal Street, there was still a puddle of the dirtyfilthysewagecholerawater behind him, anyway that street looked kind of familiar), and then back to the guy, who went over again about the dirty filthy and the stench and the cholera and then the news anchor from his comfy studio asked the question we are ALL waiting to hear: “So is it true that the water is full of deadly bacteria, and what about the pollution and chemicals, and is it true they’ve found some sort of cholera-like bacteria…” and the reporter on the scene goes over it again, syllable by syllable, making sure to e-nun-ci-ate clear-ly so all us Forrest Gumps at home sitting in front of the teevee with our Big Macs and mustard drool down our front will get it that New Orleans is very very dirty and bad and it’s bad and that bad George Bush didn’t send the men with the giant sponges and vats of Lysol and damn you Dubya! Damn you America for electing him! If John Kerry was president Katrina would have headed towards the Yucatan and then we could have been Compassionately Caring about all the drowned Mexicans while secretly wondering how the heck we were going to get our grass cut and our cars washed now that there were so many dead Mexicans is it even possible to run out of Mexicans? Well, in a Kerry-run universe we would never run out of Mexicans! Kerry would just make more! And we could have then been free of our lawn-mowing and car-washing duties so we could go to Mardi Gras, or rather we could commisserate with all our elegant, intelligent, liberal friends as to how Mardi Gras was nothing but a tourist bash full of drunken vomiting college kids and now we have to clean the place up when we’d rather have gone on ignoring all the corruption while sighing over how much we loved Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and…

So I’ve decided to quit watching the news.

(Title quote by Ambrose Bierce.)

I Get All the News I Need on Blogs Update: damn you, Chimpy McHitlerburton, damn you! (Well of course it’s the president’s fault. I mean, it has to be. Who else runs things in this country anyway? He should have made the New Orleans and Louisiana government use their plan, with his mind rays. You know he has mind rays — how else do you think he fooled all those Ameritard wingnuts to vote for him?)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Itch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.