Lebhaft Newsletter #112 (by Casey)

"It's not enough. I need more. I don't want it. I just need it. To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive" -- Tool, Stinkfist

I've been spending a lot of time on my own lately, studying, or trying to, and some things have been coming clear to me ... or maybe I'm going insane. The queen mother has died, and is getting more column inches than the people being blown up in Palestine, and more tears are being shed for her. There is a pig farm in Poco that may have hooker's bodies buried in the soil, and kids are slaughtering themselves on a regular basis street racing. Besides that I know I don't give a fuck which of the royal family are alive or dead, there has been something troubling me about all this that I think finally came clear to me last night.

I was listening to the radio and POD: The Youth of the Nation came on, and I changed the station. I hate the song. Now, why do I hate it? On the whole, the music isn't that bad - it's definitely better than I feel so alive which is one the best examples of a drastic overuse of a single idea if ever I heard one. No, it's really the lyrics that bother me. They're easy to hear, hard to ignore. (Why is it that in songs with good lyrics, it's almost impossible to hear them? Anyway)

Now the chorus is bad enough, "We are the youth of the nation" is repeated several thousand times. The line is meaningless, if you think about it. Especially in context:

Whatever it was, I know it's because
We are, we are, we are
The youth of the nation.

Why did it happen? I'm sorry, I'm not quite following.

The song is, in my opinion, another attempt to sentamentalize the "tragedy" that happened in Littleton, Colorado, three years ago. Some of us remember the sale of a tape, the scene of the crime taken by the media, juxtaposed against I Will Remember You. Surely you could not have watched this without feeling strongly emotionally affected, which is probably why it sold so well.

The media has used the word "tragedy" exhaustively. Perhaps "Mum's" death was not a tragedy, but Diana's sure was. The Littleton shooting. The street racers. The pig farm. And above all, the king of them all, September Eleventh, a dream come true to journalists who specialize in tragedy.

The reality: none of these things were tragedies when they happened. This is not to say that what happened was not bad. But a bad thing is not a tragedy. Aristotle in Poetics defined tragedy, and it was, and still is, a literary style. It is meant to arouse pity and terror in its audience. Hamlet is a tragedy. Littleton became a tragedy. The media made it into one.

I don't think I need to discuss the danger involved in journalists becoming playwrights. What happens in the world, happens. It happens without meaning. It happens without message or moral or theme. The world is not ironic and does not draw allusions to great literary works. Major events are not foreshadowed. They are not comical or dramatic or tragic. All these things made up by journalists who fancy themselves as playwrights.

The media is failing in its job to provide information, in it's pure and untainted form. For the royal family, perhaps it doesn't matter. But there are major problems when we get to important issues. The reality in the Middle East: ten times as many Palestinians have died in the past eighteen months than Israelis. What do we see?

SCENE: A family sitting down to dinner. Relatives celebrating an important holiday. A man enters. A father slowly realizes what is happening, but too late. An explosion. The audience is sobbing as the curtain falls, and they come to their feet.

SCENE: Manhattan. As the protagonist makes his way to the World Trade Centre, he frets that this is the first time in twenty years he has been late for work. Ironically, it saves his life. But after the climax has passed, the guilt is still buried within him - why did he survive when his friends and co-workers were killed? We are left with this question as the final credits roll across the screen.

See how easy it is? It is easy to make people feel something when they believe that what they are experiencing is real. We are obsessed with this. No matter if it feels good, or bad, whether it makes us laugh, or cry, we need to feel something when we pick up the paper in the morning.

Look at reality television. The name implies that what happens on screen is somehow more real than the fictional shows we watch. But the real reality is that the weeks of footage have been broken down to a few short hours, creating stories out of random events. The media is doing the same thing.

A final point, here. The media is not the guilty party. While we can argue about Southam News and their relationship to Israel, most journalists are not trying to blind us. We have demanded it to be this way. The reality is that we do not want information, we want entertainment.