Forced by her job to sanely follow the insanity of news

December 15, 2006

There's something appalling about the incurious, those people who don't follow the news. They revealed themselves on Sept. 11, 2001 when, for relief, I went for a short walk in my dozy neighbourhood in the middle of the day. "Isn't it astonishing, those planes flying into the World Trade Center?" I asked people on the street. They looked at me blankly and went back to attending their yappy little dog's tiresome refusal to excrete.

Yet I envy them. Cluelessness may be deplorable, but it's pleasant. Their only escape is intellectual obliviousness.

I don't have that option. Reading and writing about the news is what I do. The drawback is that it is unhinging, to put it generously. One might go mad spending a morning reading the internet. Other people drink coffee and clutch their quilted nylon housecoats as Martha Stewart tells them how to clean their oven knobs. (There's no art to it, Martha, just throw them in the dishwasher, they'll live.)

I sit at my computer, aghast, eyes wide, unable to speak, having been hit by the new day's blast of news from around the planet. The species is not in its right mind, I think. I despair.

If I am sane, then it's only watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart/ The Colbert Report that keeps me that way.

A web of madness

ITEM: What I would give not to know that Donald Rumsfeld, responsible for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, lives on Mount Misery, a Maryland estate so named because it was once owned by a notorious white torturer of slaves. But this is what reading blogs leads to. CBC.ca, like the nation it serves, is organized and sturdy in its reporting. But BBC News online throws everything at you, never mind the hellish consequences.

ITEM: The maintenance staff of Turkish Airlines are in trouble, the BBC informs me, for celebrating a tough week by sacrificing a camel and handing out the meat. The airline has just joined Star Alliance, which includes Air Canada, and it is, like, so embarrassing to have camels bleeding all over the duty-free.

This is meant to be lighter news, although I think it's a bit racist for me to laugh, surely … I who ate moose for two decades. Moose: the hairy moving van of the animal kingdom.

ITEM: But surely it is good to laugh at the screechingly awful Holocaust Deniers' Convention in Tehran. It's attended by the Ku Klux Klan, internationally sponsored anti-Semites and the kind of people who, frankly, you wouldn't think had the airfare.

The delegation I love, truly love, is the group of Orthodox Jews called Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City). They're at the convention to protest Zionism of all things. They say the state of Israel violates the Torah by existing, so it should close up shop. They also say the Holocaust is being used as a "tool of commercial, military and media power," so enough about that. As for Jews who say "Never again," an irate Rabbi Cohen told the anti-fact crowd. "They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy."

Could Borat be making another movie? First Texas, then Tehran? I wonder if the delegates get name-tags on nylon string and freebie packs at the registry desk with black bags from Persian Rug Barn and IranAir iPod holders. Do they all meet at the worn-out coffee dispensers in the main hall to bitch about delegates who are NOT in total Holocaust denial? Do they have sex on the sly on Party Night? Do they wear army helmets like Ernst Zundel?

Prof. Noam Chomsky says it's probably best to stop prosecuting Holocaust deniers. Punishing people for State-determined historical truth is very Goebbels-Zhdanov, he says, and it's an insult to murdered Jews to adopt the doctrines of their murderers. He has a point.

My eyes dance over the computer screen, desperate to avoid the latest Bush news.

ITEM: On this day in 1975, the British government ended an IRA hostage-taking by providing food to the holed-up kidnappers and their victims. Using a crane, "at 14:54, hot sausages, Brussels sprouts and potatoes, peaches and cream were lowered into the flat." The terrorists surrendered 25 minutes later.

Has the Iraq Study Group taken note of this?

Net effect: bad news everywhere

I read all of the above to cushion the blow of reading all of the below:

• Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq. Seventy more people were kidnapped in Baghdad.
• The Democrats will lose the Senate if South Dakota replaces an ailing senator with a Republican (civil war would then break out, but still).
• Presidential hopeful John McCain hires the GOP slime who did the racist Harold Ford ads in the mid-term elections, despite Republican racist ads in 2000 that attacked McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter.
• A Florida execution by agonizingly painful lethal injection requires a second shot after the "dead" man grimaced 34 minutes after the first.
• The corpses of more strangled and stripped women are discovered in the Suffolk woods.
• U.S.-made Agent Orange continues to cut a swathe through the third generation of Vietnamese, with a BBC video showing children with their heads twisted backward to their tailbone, and toddlers with eyes placed randomly on their face.

By now, I am homicidal. Even CBC.ca's story "Nice weather lifts spirits in Kandahar," which is a classic headline, doesn't make me laugh. It's as crazed as The Toronto Star's all-time great "Acid rain good for blueberries" and The Globe's picture of a massive truck crash on the 401 labelled "Unhappy moment."

You have to grin to bear it, but I can't any more. I wish I were a happy idiot, more concerned with my butter tarts than global warming, knitting balaclavas out of pet hair while watching the History "Old new is good news" Channel, my huge back end leaving a deepening trench in the couch.

But I am not. I am sentenced to pay attention.