2.1.00

Pearl Harbor Day. I was listening to somebody - can't remember who - on NPR earlier, recounting the first media reports of the attack. His dialogue was interspersed with those original voices calling out, virtually play-by-play, the first reports through fuzzy phone lines. The passion with which those young voices flung the news to radio audiences seems authentically dramatic. I am easily convinced that they were in shock and felt compelled to notify the larger world of tragedy more as cathartic release than restrained concern for serious reporting. These days, when I hear the voices of reporters out on the frontlines, their voices affect, more than anything else, designs for self-promotion. There is much less the sense that one was caught in a tragedy unfolding, and more that the crisis situation was sought. The current generation of media is no different from other youth, growing up in an image-saturated world where both reality and fantasy have converged to create a plethora of tragic experiences. The resulting desensitization is often referred to as a loss of innocence, but seems to me more like the oppression of the objective. We cannot have another Hindenburg or another Pearl Harbor because the valence of tragedies on that magnitude is lessened by the abundance of tragic images blazing across TV screens, the front pages of newspapers, and magazine covers. Yet, there is this weird desire to own some atrocity by which a generation can be defined. My generation has nothing like that. Instead we wait, search, or even create tragedy. And even when something atrocious does occur, it somehow fails to meet the required threshold of terror: It does not hurt enough and we are forced to sensationalize it. ++ The show reminded me of elementary school and the lunch hours I spent in the library thumbing through picture books of World War II. I read through small volumes on the fall of Mussolini, Normandy, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, etc. Grainy and scratched images of twisted machinery and men captivated me. It was the first place I read about the holocaust and the age at which those now common images of emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves were first implanted. I learned that American soldiers who survived the sinking of their ships were left in the ocean for the sharks, which would gnaw at them, one-by-one. At age ten I was obsessed with war, particularly WW II, and the prophesied nuclear Armageddon.

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