1 Boring Old Man

I had a comforting thought today, an old man kind of thought. I’ve been feeling the weight of the daily news of late. In the last century [I told you it was an old man thought], I had two categories in my mind – news and editorials. It may have been naive, but I thought of the news as just being what happened. Selective news reporting [or distorting] was something they did – Pravda, or Radio Havana. For years, I used to listen to Radio Havana at 6,000 kHz on my shortwave radio in the evenings. They played the kind of jazz I like [it persists in Cuba long after being replaced here]. When the news came on, I enjoyed its oddness, its lack of relationship to anything else I’d heard during the day. They’d report the scores from the Cuba Angola soccer games or about the preparation for the PanAm Games. There would always be some example of American Imperialism from the day. Farm production was on the rise. The coming rain would be replaced with sunshine soon. I could enjoy it because I knew it was distorted, passed through a rosy ideological filter. The world was pretty simple – things were going great and the bad guys were still off doing bad things. The soft, upbeat voice of the commentator fit with the anachronistic progressive jazz drifting in from offshore. It was a soothing fantasy world masquerading as the truth – propaganda lite.

It actually feels to me like our news has changed – blurring the comfortable boundary between news and editorial. It seems like every factual story includes something about the conflict within the facts. Obama wins Nobel Prize has something added : Republicans Ask Why? or : Limbaugh  Outraged, or Snowe Votes for Health Care: This Time, or Mayor Who Added Jobs Lost Some, Too. I’ll bet that it just feels that way, that If I went to the archives and looked at old newspapers or watched old black and white newscasts, it would be just the same – conflict no matter what the topic. There would be a difference. There wouldn’t be something like Fox News, at least not something as prominent as Fox News. But Fox News is another story. This post is about my comforting thought today, and Fox News sure isn’t it.

I was thinking about watching the Discovery Channel special about Ardi last night, the 4.4 million year old  skeleton found in Ethiopia. She walked upright like we do, but had "grasping feet" for climbing like the Chimps. They called her a "mosaic." It was a fascinating piece of human history seen through a paleontologist’s telescope. There wasn’t any conflict in the story, only curiosity. Even without all the fancy Argon dating and mega-micro scans, the skeleton itself spoke with a clear voice. She wasn’t an Ape, nor was she yet a human. Looking back from our perspective, her place in our development was without question. But if I met Ardi four million years ago, I would have had no idea where she was headed, what would come of her and her kind.

Things seen through a telescope and things seen through a magnifying glass look very different. I can look back at my old blog entries and, though I can recall the anguish I sometimes felt when I wrote them, it’s a telescopic view – already history that’s in its place. But when I read today’s news with its conflict and uncertainty, the bad feeling some things engender look huge through the magnifying glass of the present. Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe threatens to be another Project for the New American Century. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize looks like a liability of expectations. The Teabaggers might take over America just as the Religious Right did in 2000.

My last post was the second time I found myself thinking that Dick Cheney has some version of PTSD – traumatized by the First Gulf War he officiated and by 9/11, the attack he knows he missed. I think I also have a version of PTSD – from the last eight years. I haven’t yet learned to look at the news and the daily conflicts in a balanced way. It has only been nine months since reading the news from Washington for the spin or combing for evidence of yet another secret program was a perfectly appropriate thing to do. I’m still hypervigilant, jumpy when certain key phrases or people come up. I find myself reviewing well known history frequently as if saying it in print will keep it from repeating. And I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of that kind of thing going around. Like Mr. Cheney, I’m trying to prevent the past.