Here and There

Morbid curiosity is a wonderful thing. Who among us doesn’t crane their necks at the site of a car crash on the highway? Who wouldn’t stop in their tracks to watch to squirrels “doin’ it”? Who doesn’t ready the chips and dip and booze, settle into the cushy sofa, a grab the remote for the boxing match? (me, actually, but that’s another entry.)

Suppression of the press is a curious thing. A morbidly curious thing, you could say. Sometimes, it’s apparent, as can be seen with the corpse recovery efforts in New Orleans, or the barring of photos of the coffins of slain soldiers returning to America from Iraq. The curious part, as I see it, is when we don’t know it’s happening. What do we not know? Finding out falls as much within the job description of journalists as does reporting on and explaining what we already know.

You can’t know there’s a war going on, or how truly terrible the whole endeavor of war is, if you can’t see it or hear it. You can read about the conditions under which people were left for dead in New Orleans, but it’s easier to deny or to move on if you don’t see it.

Speaking of moving on, I think that’s the salient issue here: never mind the wars and natural destruction, the ineptitude and gross failings and obvious mismanagement of government going on all around us. Just donate a little money to the Red Cross and go back to work and football.

I’m still personally holding out hope that Hurricane Katrina will be the one event that will not recede in the American psyche. As I wrote in my second entry on the storm, this could be what swings the pendulum the other way, whatever that may mean.

And there’s something more vital, less fleeting and animalistic about the need to see the bodies in New Orleans: it reinforces and verifies the reality that this disaster occurred. It also brings home the magnitude of the destruction of human life. Suppressing the media ultimately adds salt to the wound, when it’s meant to serve as a sanitizing balm.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.