Saturday August 5, 2006
The Guardian
Everyone has their own tipping point. For some it was North Korea's decision to fire missiles over the sea of Japan last month; for others it was the transcript of Bush and Blair rap-speaking at the G8; the relief into which the number of Iraqi dead has been thrown by the war in Lebanon did for many more and for those really paying attention, it was the collapse of the world trade talks last week. None of these crises are in themselves unique, but they have built up over the weeks until you are watching the news one night and suddenly there it is: the out-of-body experience and sense that everything, everywhere, is out of whack. It's like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum, finding himself being chased by a T-Rex, struggles momentarily to organise a response. "I'm fairly alarmed here," he says. I'm fairly alarmed here.
The surprising thing is that any of this has come as a surprise. The day after George Bush was elected for a second term, all those who had been rooting for the other guy (who was it, again?) predicted that the world as we knew it was shortly to end. It was comforting, in a gothic sort of way, to throw oneself around like Sybil Thorndike and imagine just how bad things were going to get. "The one consolation," a friend of mine emailed at the time, "is that he
will screw things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour. That's if we still have a world."
It seems rather quaint, that attitude, now. The despondency was real and the doom-mongering heartfelt, but they were still rooted in the superstition that, by preparing for the worst, one reduced the chances of it actually happening. On the November 4, 2004, when people moaned "we're all going to die," what they meant was, "we're all going to carry on pretty much as before," such being the limits to the human imagination. And given Bush's approach to Iraq, Iran and the environment, "just as before" seemed bad enough.
When things started to deteriorate, it took a while to register. We are accustomed, as sophisticated consumers of the 24-hour news media, to taking a rolling approach to disaster, which means never regarding a story as finite, which means pretending that nothing has ultimate consequences, which means, if you want to go the whole philosophical hog, existing in a constant state of denial about death. Anyway. In news as in life, the way we deal with disturbing events is to wrap them in analytical packaging, an evasion that makes us feel more in control. If you don't have a position on war in the Middle East, you at least have an appreciation for the range of positions at your disposal and as long as Sky News keeps booking the experts and loading the graphics, there is no catastrophe too great or too strange to absorb.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1837808,00.html
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