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The week that was in America: draining
2008-02-10
There's a fortune-cookie-style proverb that sounds like a blessing but, legend says, is really a curse: "May you live in interesting times." The saying is usually attributed to ancient China, but it is, by many indications, entirely American. Which makes it particularly suitable as we pause, on the weekend, to consider the past week -- an extremely violent, chaotic, anguished and, yes, horrifyingly fascinating week in our 231-year-old republic. Ugly things. Violent things. Elemental things. Epic things. The forces of nature and human anger unleashed in concentrated form across the land. Water and fire, gun and sky, bringing destruction, death and misery. And tears. America's body count for the week from Feb. 2 to Saturday tops four score. Fifty-nine dead from the tornadoes in the South. Five dead after Edwin Rivera opened fire on his family and a SWAT officer in Los Angeles. Six killed in Kirkwood, Mo., when Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton opened fire at a city council meeting and was slain by police. Five women herded into the back room of a suburban Chicago Lane Bryant store and gunned down by a man still at large. You can't even fit it into a single paragraph. Here's more: Three dead in an Oregon plane crash, three dead in a Louisiana vocational college shooting, five dead and three missing in a Georgia sugar refinery explosion. An Ohio teacher stabbed in front of her grade-school students after her estranged husband walked into the classroom and pulled a knife. Across the state, hundreds of homes damaged in severe flooding. Hordes of motorists stranded on Wisconsin roads by snow. And that doesn't count the wounded. Nor does it tally the dizzying ack-ack of nondestructive and non-tectonic events during the same one-week span. Super Sunday (an upset) gave way to Super Tuesday (not so much). An intense Mitt Romney surprised some by leaving the presidential race, and an erratic Britney Spears surprised everyone by leaving the hospital. A hungry Microsoft tried to swallow Yahoo whole, and the space shuttle Atlantis launched after a two-month delay. Deep breaths. Turn off the television. Fire up the screensaver and walk away, brother. No one's comparing Britney's peculiar travails to a mass shooting, of course. But the sheer sensory news overload of this past week shoved us further toward a point of collective saturation that's remarkable even for the savvy, media-obsessed culture that we have become. Are things getting worse? Is too much happening for us to process? Should we, like Steve Carell in "Evan Almighty," begin building an ark? Or do we just know about more stuff quicker, thanks to the incessant media maelstrom of Internet broadband, cable news and articles like this one? "When you wake up and get your cup of coffee and turn on the `Today' show and hear one story and say, `Oh, my,' and the next three are just as bad, it has an impact on how you start your day," says Brenda Garton, a former TV news anchor who teaches in the communication department at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. "We are surrounded and consumed by this news. It's at work, it's at school, it's at home, it's on our Web sites," she says. "We're certainly given more of a front seat to it today. ... I hope we're not getting numb when we hear about some severe tragedy." Rarely in modern memory has spectacle been so intense as to be both numbing and utterly addictive to watch. There was, of course, that indelible week in September 2001. And the excruciating weekend in 1963 that began with a president cut down by bullets and ended with his assassin falling to the same fate. There were riots in the 1960s, hostage crises in the 1970s, a shuttle explosion in the 1980s and a white Bronco and a blue dress in the 1990s. But except for 9/11, all those happened before the unremitting, Web-driven news cycle really came of age. And, more important, even the most destructive of them were pretty much self-contained. What made the past week so unsettling, so utterly rubberneckable, was not only the nature of events but their breadth. It was enough to make you look at everything around you -- the weather, the television, fellow Americans -- with the cold eye of suspicion. By week's end, the quotes on the news were starting to sound sadly, distressingly alike -- such sound bites as, "There was mass pandemonium -- people running," and "We want to wake up from this nightmare." Those could have been uttered in Georgia, in Kentucky, in Missouri, in Arkansas, in California -- and in two places in Ohio. As it happened, they were said, respectively, by a police sergeant after a 23-year-old woman named Latina Williams opened fire on a Louisiana college campus and killed two fellow students, and by a church secretary after her pastor was killed in a car accident while counseling Tennessee tornado victims. Then there was flood-weary furniture store owner Jim Heringhaus of Ottawa, Ohio, summing things up for the country -- albeit inadvertently -- as he talked to his governor Friday. "I don't know," he said, "how many more of these I can take." We tend to think that the more technologically advanced and sophisticated we get, the more we control our environment. That's sweet but silly, and it only takes one Cookie Thornton to disabuse an entire community of that notion. And, as the past week shows, it only takes a few of them to send the message to a nation. At the same time, though, Americans are an optimistic people -- or, at least, we've convinced ourselves that we are. We get beaten about the face and head and instinctively insist we'll pick up pieces, lick wounds and go on. We hunger for hopeful headlines like the one Friday afternoon on CNN's crawl: "Miracle in the mud -- baby survives tornado." Whether truth or posturing, it's part of the American narrative to believe that, even as we live through the curse of interesting times, tomorrow's another day. Don't stop thinking about it, we sing -- it's always a day away. Beware, however. These days in America, tomorrow is something else, too, something more forbidding: It's yet another news cycle waiting to happen.
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