The Anchoress
Two and a half weeks later…not much has changed, except, hopefully, me.
When I left on July 5 I did it declaring – to myself, at least – that I was hereby “detaching” myself from all associations with news and news by-products. Not only would I not be blogging, but I would not be reading other blogs or websites. As much as I could while traveling within the world, I would not be watching or reading news unless troubling circumstances truly warranted it.
They never did. While my family and I were renewing ourselves (the fish was delish – all of it!) we heard a newsy whisper here and there – someone told us “Katie Couric slapped a news editor and the stock market is going nuts” and made it sound a bit like the first directly caused the second and that amused us. Well, it amused me. My family couldn’t care less about Katie Couric and they were not that impressed to hear me chuckle that I – a mere housewife – had known better than Les Moonves in the matter of Katie Couric and the CBS News Anchor Desk, from start to inevitable finish. I tried to warn ’em.
“Watch, Couric’s next step will be to start blaming CBS (and sexist viewers) for all of her woes, and she’ll end up leaving the gig in time to be President Hillary’s press secretary; the Peter Principal at work!”
“We’re on vacation; don’t want to hear it,” the family said, and I agreed, and shut up.
We did miss the crossword puzzles and Sodukos, but we really didn’t miss the news. And why should we? Every day’s news is exactly the same as it was before we left. Two and a half weeks later, the Congress still hasn’t done anything (they may have started a few more investigations into President George W. Bush, but that wouldn’t exactly be different, would it?) The way-too-early political campaigns are meeting with the yawns of a public already burned out and bored by the stultifying and predictable speeches, the content-less debates and the transparent pandering and re-tooling that used to go on behind closed doors but now happens as we watch, with no one batting an eye in surprise. Oh, yeah…Hillary showed some cleavage – that was apparently compelling enough news for coverage in the Washington Post – except that Hillary’s cleavage was really neither new nor news; I wrote about it a year ago, here.
It might have been more interesting to read some fashionista’s observation that Hillary is once again wearing pink, which she only does – at least in my memory – when she is trying to “soften” her image to court those unsophisticated suburbanites who she believes are silly enough to be swayed by seeing her swathed in pastels, or when she is trying to explain away her incredible luck in cattle futures trading.
Oh, and “24” – which I stopped watching last season because, enough, already – is going to feature a female president next season – just in time to get the world used to the idea. Ummm…not exactly news – as with the cleavage and the pink suits, we’ve been here before.
Yesterday I opened the NY Times Magazine (crossword puzzles!) and read two new entries into the incredibly tired, lame and played out lefty “George Bush is stupid, incurious and he lost in 2000” mythology, here (“It all seems so improbable. George Bush? A bookworm?“) and here (“Needless to say I was a bit stunned. A letter from President Bush’s brain?…I was also a bit stunned because the letter was funny.” Oh, look, conservatives are actually almost like real human people!) and here (“I’ve rarely voted for a winner in my political life, with the exception of Al Gore.”) and I just thought. This adolescent carping is so old, it’s so predictable, so incurious and the mythology so demonstrably false, and yet these folks never tire of it – day after day they say the same thing – year after year…and they still think it’s witty. And apparently they still giggle. I just find it boring – but then I’m no sophisticate, and I wouldn’t have hired Katie Couric, either, so what do I know?
Anyhow, there seem to me to be only a couple of interesting developments within the past two weeks: some bloggers may have called foul on another story out of Baghdad, some more bloggers have created a website strictly meant to take on the myths created or sustained by the press, and oh, yeah, the Democrats want to make sure that citizens trying to report suspicious behavior by seeming terrorists can get their asses sued off for their efforts. In other words, the Dems still aren’t taking the whole idea that there are terrorists out there very seriously.
As I said, nothing has changed. All the stories are the same, we can simply re-file them and change the dates. It almost feels like the press and the whole world are in a holding pattern – there is no news, there are only re-framed, re-worked narratives – until George W. Bush gets out of office and the new narratives are permitted to form.
For that reason, and for some others, I think the direction of this blog is going to change soon – but more on that in the next post. For now, I have almost 2000 emails to wade through – please bear with me – a quick look at the headers tells me that the mailbox is full the usual political releases by campaigns and advocate groups, and also of hate-fueled snark from the left and hate-fueled hysteria from the right, so nothing is new there, either. Also, I have a life to get back in gear. While I do that, you can check out this marvelous commencement address to the graduates of Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio, by Archbishop Timothy Dolan, whom we poor foundlings in New York could surely use (and rather desperately need) to replace the foppish and remote Cardinal Egan. Dolan seems like a really swell throwback to the mighty Cardinal John O’ Connor.
It’s rainy here, and I like it. Hope you’re having a good day, too.
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