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Lileks: "Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away"
Another day, another shipment from the claptrap factory. AP story:EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL. Thats the headline. First line: Is everything spinning out of control? No. But they go on: Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Previous generations rolled up their sleeves and swam out there and saved those polar bears. As for abysmal home values, it depends where you are; Ill admit that people who sank everything in Miami condo markets are finding their psyches chipped and dinged, but A) lower home prices mean people who want to buy one but couldnt afford it now are sitting better B) the authors can take heart in this story about San Francisco being unaffordable for the middle class. Thank God! Theres hope! Cue the obligatory heartland cant-do fella with busted bootstraps: "It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change." Rochester has had zero tornadoes this year, if I recall correctly. Even if they do get one, it probably won't be as bad as the 1883 example, which was bad enough to have its own Wikipedia page. But again: what has happened to America that your optimism is insufficient to turn away rotating clouds? In the old days, by jiminey-crackers, wed hold up pictures of Roosevelt and the twisters would just melt away. The guys 64 years old, and he hasnt figured out that some things get better, some things get worse, some things stay the same, and some things to which no ones paying attention will shape the news much more than the panic du jour in the news today? Hes 64, and cant figure out that grown men dont say scary unless describing how they felt about the Wolfman when they were nine? It is amusing, really after sticking peoples heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished. Of course, not everyone feels this way; Id guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But theres another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork tossd in a sea of cruel destiny, that you cant do anything, that nothing will get better no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that theres something abroad in the land thats had a good hardy larf about Horatio Alger and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but youd better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it? The bottom of the page says Average rating: two out of five stars. Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. Were in worse shape than we thought. Posted by: Mike 2008-06-23 |
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