It's been a long time since I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant. I expect to not make much sense. :)
After seeing all the advertisements of what is lined up, the only thing that is going to convince me to turn on the television this September 11th is if something new blows up.
This isn't about grief, or respect, or commemorating the dead. It's about adopting someone else's tragedy. It's standing by the side of the road, gaping at the wrecked car. It's an emotionally stunted public trying to become part of something bigger, even if that “something bigger” is a mass-murder. It's about taking the humanity away from everyone involved in the event, and turning them into media symbols.
This isn't part of a healing process. Showing all that footage again in prime time isn't a memorial of lives lost, it's a replay of death. Showing the fire-fighters rushing into a building we know is about to collapse on them, that we've seen collapse a thousand times already in the last year, is voyeurism, pure and simple.
It's the same pattern repeated. When two children in England are murdered, the news value of the event in Australia is practically nil. But it's run anyway, full page spreads in the tabloids, pictures in the news, for weeks on end. Why? For the entertainment of the masses. Yes, it's entertainment. It's something that has absolutely no meaningful impact on the people who read it, it just provokes an emotional reaction. It's the same reason we go see movies. It's a tear-jerker, a murder mystery, and in the end they catch the killers.
Entertainment. We live mostly routine, unremarkable lives, and that's not enough. We crave the endorphin rush we get from extremes of emotion, that natural chemical hit. It's just so much more convenient to get that hit vicariously, to momentarily adopt someone else's emotion, than to actually be involved. Much less messy. Much easier to limit it to a short, intense moment, and then be done with it and go back to our lives, sated.
Until, of course, it's time to re-show all the footage for the first anniversary.
