© 2013, UrbisMedia
They say “everybody loves a parade,” but, regrettably, it seems a dark feature of human nature, that more people would prefer a disaster (as audience, not victim). We are, it seems, unable to look away from the car crash, the shooting victim, the SWAT team rushing into a building, or the suicide standing on a ledge. We are the “lookee lus’s” to events that take us out of our humdrum ordinary lives (especially in times when those lives are qualitatively in decline) and provide us with the salient existential moment of “there but for the grace of God, go I.” “If it bleeds, it leads” goes the old newspaper axiom and you could probably sell more papers withNine Religious Dashboard Statuettes Perish in Head on Crash than City Balances its Budget.
Disaster, natural and, especially, man-made, sells. Like war, its profitable, although rarely for the victims or those who have to respond to their plight. Nobody does his better than those consummate practitioners of entrepreneurial advantage the Americans, where some of the biggest industries are, guns, porn, drugs, casinos, and pernicious financial institutions. (Sorry, Libertarians and Tea Party morons, I intentionally left “government” out of the list because you just wouldn’t get it.)
A lot of what is to follow owes, I believe, to the post 9/11 effect in America. But, before that, for comparative purposes, consider the manner in which this country during the 1960s when we endured the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, but comparatively dignified manner in which we processed these disastrous events. Admittedly, national mass media was not as varied and advanced as it is today and, in the absence of social media that allows us to express a real emotion and mood change in a tweet or posting on our Facebook wall, there were fewer means by which feelings could be expressed individually, if not publicly. In the past, people might have worn a black armband for a suitable period, or draped black bunting over the home photograph of the fallen president, but there were none of the ubiquitous ribbons of various colors to be affixed to lapels or the backs of cars to publicly announce our emotions.
But these days it seems that public mourning and hand wringing over this or that disaster or episode of mass killing have become our national pastime. Occurring with the regularity of each television season’s new reality programs are several days of news media intense and scarcely-disguised elation at the opportunity to milk another national tragedies for bump in their ratings and advertising revenue. It has become a staple, since 9/11, of the broadcast news media to endure four hours the “standup” soi-dissant journalist, with crime scene and crime scene tape as backdrop, droning on, with perhaps a crawl text underneath, insert screens or cutaways to looped video tape, and all too often, invented speculations that violate journalistic protocols, but are necessary to maintain an edge over competing networks doing standups just up the street. To these may be added the inevitable search for someone—the witness, a near victim, a victim’s relative, someone want to school with the perpetrator, someone who knew somebody who went to school with the perpetrator, the perpetrators relative, someone who had the same name as a suspect of the perpetrator and was mistakenly detained, in short, anyone—who can be interviewed to keep the viewer a fixed to that screen. The sheer inanity of enduring to the perseverations of faux journalists like Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Geraldo Rivera, or anybody from Fox news, whose linguistic incapacities are often matched by the insincerity of their sincerity, begs for a new psychological category for mass self-delusion.
Typically, it seems that the first thing that many Americans do following any man-made disaster or natural catastrophe, is run for their Bibles. We see it time and time again, the clergy, the self-anointed explainers of all things inexplicable, the unjust justifiers of the un-judgable, the jerk-off Jeremiahs assigning culpability to gays, liberals, idolaters and others whom they have already consigned to the fires of hell. They relish these moments to flip through Scripture in search of the apt quote that they can couple with an “I told you so,” they glorify themselves in their sacrosanct schadenfreude, toggling their inane babble between blame and blessing.
The thumpers vie with the vampire media who feed on such incidents with the urgency and veracity of salacious gossips amongst a vacuous clique of junior high schoolers. Disasters are moments, milked and stretched into days, fashioned with endless loops of video of bombs exploding, of crushed buildings, of victims being asked how they feel about being victims, of the search for anyone who can be, like a winner on American Idol, called “hero” or, failing that, an interview with any bystander who knew, saw, or felt, something, anything, to keep the standup standing in front of the smoldering or the ring of crime tape, between the apt commercial breaks for auto insurance, various pharmaceuticals, especially for erectile dysfunction, anything to keep you from reaching for that remote.
Then there are the minor political bloodsuckers, the police chief, the coroner, who too often see their chance enhance their electoral potential or to perform for a national audience on an impromptu version of “American Hero,” eager not to let slip their Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, flash bulbs and microphones, a chance to flavor their responses to supplicating media flacks with professional sounding terminology.*
Let’s not forget the various “victim’s assistance” operations that flock to the scene of the disaster or massacre, setting up web sites where, if you are unable to purchase a condolence balloon, a sweet mournful Teddy Bear, or a commemorative candle to go along with a little stick in the ground Old Glory to show your patriotic fervor matches your expression of grief, you can cough-up some money that just might get to the families of victims. Just don’t waste your funds on some support for a gun regulation lobby because it is like flushing it down the toilet because—freaking amazingly—gun sales actually go up after a gun massacre in the Good Ole incredibly stupid US of A and, despite the fact that guns are freely sold to the mentally-ill, laws for background checks are thwarted by the gun nut lobby. Despite the fact that there are virtually no instances of deterrence of gun massacres by dim-witted “concealed carry” wannabe vigilantes, people still fantasize that that are better protected by their quick draw.**
And so future massacres are all but guaranteed in a toxic brew of proliferating firearms, inadequate medical care, unemployment and exploited workers, and media, clergy and public officials who cluck on about what must, but won’t be, changed and cheerlead the public mourning. It’s only a matter of time before we are offered Housewives of Fallen First Responders on cable.
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© 2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.20.2013)
*Just see if you can find the interview of the Connecticut state corner after the Newton school shooting.
**Most, if not all, of them would be quicker at soiling their underwear in such circumstances and could probably not hit a barn if they were inside it. I not longer encounter my (few) gun-loving friends and acquaintances about the latest mass murder only to be receive some myopic and mindless NRA mantra that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Ah, but people with guns do it so much more efficiently.