Afternoon on the southbound Garden State Parkway, one of the New Jersey’s main arteries. We are on our way to the so-called exit 0, Cape May, at the tip of the state. The roadway is crowded and we have spent considerable time sitting in stopped traffic. The Toyota is in need of some fuel and so are we. Dodging a lumbering SUV, we head off the highway onto the ramp for the next service center.
After some searching, we find a space in the vast parking lot and walk up to the building. Once inside we are greeted by crowds and a choice of fast food menus. After waiting in line and making our selections, we find an empty table amongst the many seated diners.
Mounted on brackets above the diners are two large TV monitors. And many heads are turned in the direction of the monitors. In fact, a number of people are standing so that they will be better able to see the broadcast.
What could it be? Perhaps some new revelations regarding the NSA? Perhaps a new low in the administration’s approval numbers? (Maybe we should start calling them disapproval numbers.) Or perhaps some entirely new and fascinating scandal?
But no, it is none of these.
Standing up to get a clear view I can see cars on the screen. It is a car chase out in Dallas. Police are attempting to apprehend an individual for some unknown transgression. The camera, apparently mounted in a helicopter, is following the pursued vehicle down the roadway.
I was expecting more.
Would a new NSA revelation have received the same attention? I have my doubts.
Chicken/egg question. Did infotainment come first, or the “need” for it? I wonder how many of these people would know what the Downing Street Memo is?
Perhaps Don Henley was right, crap is king.
None of them would know what the Downing St. Memo is. Television news is all about entertainment now, with clearly defined good/bad guys, theme music, a thrilling climax and an ending, all within a news cycle.
The general public doesn’t have the attention span to follow things like the NSA spying, the Plame leak and investigation, the lies leading to the Iraq war, etc.
I don’t know what came first. But I think it started with Sesame Street and MTV – short little action-packed segments with lots of movement and bright lights. We really have no attention span anymore.
Well said.
The TV stuff is psychology at its worst: don’t even deal with the cortex, stay with the inner, emotional substrate almost entirely.
And though I love some parts of Sesame Street (compared to most of the drek that passes for children’s tv), I think you are right about those short and shortening attention spans.
I LOVE Sesame Street! How can you be a mother and not love it?
But after watching it for a couple of years my attention span shrank to about 15 seconds. 🙂
Your average working class Joe couldn’t give you equivalent details during Watergate either. By the time news filters down to the mass of Americans it registers only as general perceptions: “We’re losing Vietnam,” “Nixon is a Crook.” They couldn’t give you a detailed, logical, factual rationale then, and they cannot today. It does not change the fact that their perceptions matter in the voting booth. The big picture is that Bush is at circa 30% popularity and dropping, and those folks at the highway rest stop “get it.” Ask them why they’ve soured on Bush, and you’ll likely hear “What the hell ever happened to Osama?” “Why is gas $3.00 a barrel? I’ll tell you – so Cheney’s friends can get rich.” and “Oh yeah, I feel safe with Bush in charge – like those poor suckers in New Orleans.” That is the conventional wisdom, the unspoken assumptions of voters going into the booth this November, the zeitgeist. They have no idea who Fitzpatrick is, but when Fitzmas comes they’ll add to their metal list “Bush is surrounded by crooks.”
I grew up in such a family, and you cannot expect more than they can give. They need all their mental energy to figure out how to pay the bills and keep the car and the plumbing running, fixing them themselves because they can afford neither a mechanic nor a plumber. Never mind how to pay medical bills or for a kid’s braces or eyeglasses. And when they get a break they take the wife and kids to Wildwood or Cape May for a couple of days once a year, stopping in the rest stop where you met them. Their eyes were attracted to a moving picture. It’s an instinct left over from our days avoiding saber-tooth cats.
Once in their lives they’ll splurge and go to Disney World. When Watergate was gearing up, I was in 8th grade and the family was passing through DC on the way home from Disney World. My mother had never been to DC from Philly, and my father hadn’t been to DC since he was in the Army! And I was the one who insisted on buying a WaPo from the machine to see what Nixon was up to that day. My parent’s didn’t have the mental wherewithal to spare… The night Nixon gave his resignation speech we were driving the backroads (no tolls) back to Philly from Wildwood in a thunderstorm, just like in Rocky Horror when Brad and Janet’s car broke down, LOL. My father was interested in keeping the car on the road, my mother in keeping my younger brothers from killing each other or spilling food on the cloth seats of the Chevy Impala. Only I was really paying attention to the speech. But they knew enough to know Nixon was a crook and they were glad to see him go.
So don’t expect more than they can give. I’m more than grateful that they’re aware enough to have Bush where he is in the polls. When we give them a little more security in their lives, better education, etc. maybe we’ll have a right to expect some kind of Norman Rockwell sense of civics from them. Even today, I’m happy if my parents vote, and vote Democratic. They define their world in circumscribed terms of immediate needs. Could they do more, do better? Maybe. But who are we to judge?
“But who are we to judge?”
We are part, anyway, of the only ‘judges’ there are, the only judges there rightly can be–in one’s own country, referring to one’s fellow men and women– in a matter of this sort, namely: how well or badly are we doing living up to our civic and other social responsibilities to ourselves and others in our communities–town, county, state, nation, and world beyond these?
I think we not only have the right to judge ourselves as a people, we’ve the obligation to do so–provided we distinguish responsibly between that which is our business–the greater public’s business–to judge in others besides ourselves.
It strikes me that Bush and Co., while refusing to be held accountable unless there’s simply no way for them to duck it, show themselves eager to judge others–and not on only those matters of legitimate public interest, but on all sorts of matters of a strictly personal, even intimate, nature.
That means that people’s rights are flagrantly violated on the one hand, and that those in and out of positions of public responsibility–“citizenship” is a position of public responsibility–are not discharging their duties.
We’d better learn to properly judge again, I think.
need a break now and then — that’s why Keith Olbermann has the “Oddball” segment in the midst of the “harder” news segments, and the “Keeping Tabs” gossip near the end; it’s the news equivalent of a piece of double chocolate cake after eating your broccoli.
And we’re getting to the point that new revelations of wrong-doing or scandals in this misAdministration are treated with a “Ho-hum, so what else is new” attitude; there’s just so damn many of them. But a car chase…well, people watch because they think this might be the one time the guy gets away.
I was at a restaurant here in Sunnyvale and the TV was on CNN — they were showing a car chase down in SoCal. I sheepishly admit that I was glued to the screen, and wouldn’t leave till the situation was resolved.