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THE LAST NEWSWEEK:
I FINALLY GIVE UP ON CULCHER AND THE NEWS
Fifteen years ago I used
to read the newspaper (the Memphis Commercial Appeal]
religiously every morning. Then I noticed that every morning I
became furiously angry, usually about the time I finished reading
the newspaper. Finally connecting effect with cause, I realised
that the stupidity, lies, obscenities, and generally moronic events
and acts recounted in the newspaper were making me mad. Every
morning I was overdosing on stupidity.
LIVING WITHOUT THE NEWS
“What if I just stopped
reading it?” I wondered.
A thrill of terror shot
through my body. How could I live without “the news”? Recalling
optimistically that I had long since sworn off TV news successfully,
I screwed up my hope and resolution.
I went newspaper cold
turkey . . . and haven’t missed it a single day since. But I
still clung to my weekly dose of Newsweek. However, in the
past couple of years I’ve been noticing that I don’t get around to
reading it as quickly as I used to, and some weeks not at all. When
I do read it, my attention keeps wandering.
ACUTE STUPIDITY
POISONING
With the October 28,
2002 issue I hit bottom. The cover featured a picture of dead rock
star Kurt Cobain and promised extracts from his diaries. (Be
still, my beating heart.) Now maybe I was just too sleepy when
I tried to read it, but honestly, page after page was so utterly
stupid, so unashamedly brainless, that I couldn’t steel myself to
finish reading a single article.
Who cares whether
Winona Ryder meant to shoplift $5,000 bucks worth of
clothes? If she didn’t mean to, why did she walk out of Saks
without paying for it?
And thanks, Newsweek,
for the pictures of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond in wheelchairs,
just to remind us that the South is dying out. (Like you’ve been
trying to convince us for 137 years, unsuccessfully.)
Ask me whether I care
that the drought has hurt the marijuana crop.
And surprise, surprise!
The USA Patriot Act -- to help track down terrorists – allows the
FBI to check library borrowers’ records and forbids librarians to
tell anyone. So we live in a police state? My, that’s some
news.
Then there’s 10 or 15
pages about Islamic terrorists meant to send turmoil foaming through
the reader, followed by a special insert about how great China is,
just like Japan was, a few years before it came unravelled.
Next comes an article
about Internet gambling (I’m all ears), followed by the fight
over farmed versus wild salmon (yawn), and a couple of slurs
against Christianity (more on the Salem witchcraft trials, hot news
surely since most Christians I know are busy persecuting innocent
witches these days, and the Vatican’s refusal to accept American
bishops’ plan for dealing with priests accused of sexual offenses).
And, like, wow,
there was a review of Icelandic band Sigur Rós’s latest album named
“( )”. Yes, empty parentheses. (Roughly translated, “Sigur Rós” in
Icelandic means, “He who drinks Wild Irish Rose with kippered
herring and chocolate cake becomes a candidate for projectile
vomiting.”) The album has eight untitled songs.
Oh, and don’t forget the
extracts from the Cobain diaries, like, deep, deep, deep stuff,
y’knowhattuhmeanman? I can’t remember the rest of it. It was too
stupid to register permanently on my brain.
I threw the Newsweek
across the room in disgust. I felt as if I had been listening to
some lamebrain rhapsodizing over a vintage Kool-Aid – “Ah, September
– that was an extraordinary month, with the ultra-saccharine
depth of corn sugar, overtones of white sugar, and just a hint of
chemical grape!”
Look, I’m not asking to
like everything I read, or to agree with it, or even that it
all makes sense, but at least it ought to be interesting. At
least it ought to keep my attention. The infantile US print and
broadcast media have degenerated into memorializing the immemorable,
legitimizing the illegitimate, and transforming the dust bunnies of
culture into the Bayeux Tapestry.
Slopping hogs is more
morally elevating. At least a hog never pretends to be anything but
a hog.
-- F. Sanders
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