We're so filled with stories, local crimes and small incidents, celebrity lives and deaths, animal attacks and house fires, that it's hard to discern anymore when something really matters. For everyone that the Rude Pundit saw in that fast food dining area, it was more of the noise of information. They had places to be. They had cell phones and Blackberries and GPS systems, and all of that technology told them that their lives were more important, always more important, than the lives of others.
Surely, when they arrive at their homes or hotels, they will be told to feel sorrow by the news networks. And maybe they will allow for something like sympathy, an approximation of emotion, the simulacrum of grief, to creep into their hearts and minds. After all, we will be told, we are a nation in mourning.
But mostly we are a dead-souled country, so inured to horror that even when something of incredible violence occurs on our soil, well, heck, we've been reminded of 9/11 so often that anything lesser hardly seems worthy of time in our Palm Pilots.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The Rude Pundit
This is one of those times when I like him better as a straight man than as a vulgarian.
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3 comments:
I don't know, CN -- what does this post do for you? I can't call the three paragraphs terribly off-base, but it would be astretch to call them particularly insightful. And in the end, they're not particularly coherent, either. Is the Rude Pundit annoyed at demands for his sympathy, or the lack of sympathy in everyone else? (Sure, both is an answer, but doesn't that deserve more and different explanation that the post offers?) There's an indictment of technology, but I suspect that would be disavowed as secondary to the greater disaffection of the post. The greater disaffection, though, seems more symptom than diagnosis, which leaves it ill-served by the caustic cynicism that comes with.
I thought it was one of the more original angles on what's been going on, albeit not the most important one. The issue wasn't lack of sympathy but why there's a lack of sympathy. I didn't read it as a simple "people are assholes" observation. Everybody drowns in white noise so this seems like just another story, barely different from Anna Nicole or Don Imus. It fed my anti-technology bent, maybe I'm an easy audience for it.
it wasn't particularly eloquent, but it did make a decent point. afterall, look at how quickly the cable news channels began to focus on "moving-on," less than a full day after the shooting, probably in part because of their saturation coverage.
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