When All We Can Do Is Watch

On December 26 the tsunami hit, and on the 27th I set out on a long car trip, circling through the south and visiting family. So while most of you were being continually hammered by new and terrible information, I was getting it in small, amazing pieces--a headline on a motel newspaper, a TV broadcast in a diner. The numbers mounted in a way that seemed unreal, artificial. At first it was twenty thousand feared dead, then seventy, and all of a sudden someone told me the toll was nearing 140,000.

The numbers seemed not just unreal, but random. Why not 500,000, or only 50? How big would the number have to be before I could register it? And, even if I did, what difference would it make? None to those who were suffering, and none to my own plans, arranged months ago. No matter what the number was, I was going to spend the afternoon driving through Georgia. While broken bodies were being piled on the shore, I would be standing in a gas station comparing the calorie cost of Cracker Jacks and an ice cream bar. As women crouched and wailed in the merciless sun, I would be listening to my son's new William Shatner CD, amused by the nosebleed heights of pop culture irony.

I was being a textbook example of one of the problems of modern media. When Neil Postman published his epoch-making book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" in 1984, he called the relevant chapter, "Now... This."

Those are the little words a television announcer uses when moving from one story to the next, and Postman proposes that they constitute a grammatical innovation: if a conjunction joins things, "Now... this" not only separates them but establishes a bright line of irrelevance. The words, Postman says, "indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see." No news can be so miserable, titillating, or alarming that it can't be briskly erased, and the way cleared for something new.

Postman would have felt vindicated by the main page on AOL the morning I left. It showed a closeup photo of a distraught young man with dark brown skin, his head cradled in one hand and tears streaming down his face. The headline read (if memory's correct), "70,000 Feared Dead."

But below that there were several other news stories. After all the tsunami wasn't the only thing happening in the world, you can't think about it all the time. Each had a short headline marked with a bullet point. The last one read: "Holiday Travel Nightmares."

Nightmares? Do we know anything about nightmares, in comparison with what that weeping man knew? Who had he lost? What could I ever know of his suffering? I was repelled. But later that day, after hours of creeping down I-95 at 20 mph, I was griping to my husband about the holiday traffic.

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