Exit, Pursued by a Bear

It's official. My real life is no longer sufficiently interesting to justify this continued demand on your attention. I will now begin to fabricate.

Someone almost said, you can take the artist out of the theater, but you can't take the theater out of the artist. I find myself thinking along these lines, "On day fourteen, the protagonist begins to buckle under the strain of her daily blog-posting schedule. Her posts become confessional and disorganized. She abandons her lofty pursuits of global-scale insight, instead struggling to maintain basic soundness of mind. Can she possibly achieve her goals? Check back next week to find out."

And here I am this morning, sitting at my desk with my usual cup of coffee -- the one that lists in very small print a few score foods that are high in protein and therefore good to eat while pregnant -- bravely battling the impulse to write you a really sizzling opening act closer. Maybe a gambling debt. Or a rich uncle returning from Peru. Or a ferocious wild animal.

On one uneventful evening before I started this experiment, Nick and I found ourselves sitting back to back at our respective computers. I didn't have any new messages and so was bored.

"Hey, honey, what are you doing?"

"Nothing." He closed his computer kind of quickly. "Nothing at all. What do you want to do?"

I wanted to make some hot cocoa. As we stood in the kitchen a few minutes later, Nick told me that, in this case, "nothing at all" had meant watching a stroller with a child in it fall off a platform in front of a speeding subway train.

I won't link the video, because I don't really want to watch it. But it is viral, and if you would like for it to enter your consciousness it will be only too happy to oblige. I am now one of these people who does that regularly -- not the part where your kid almost dies, but the part where you take them with you on the subway. I wear Stella on my chest and I push Milo in a stroller, and even if the subway didn't make me nervous, the busy intersection between my house and the train station certainly would.

Here's a really good way to make me crazy: fill my already not-big-enough brain with a mesmerizing, repeating image of disaster.

I just googled "image bear attack" to get a picture to go with my catchy post title, and the first dozen images seem deeply inappropriate for mass consumption. Gaping flesh. Ripped up faces. A hole where a bone ought to be. I find myself feeling a little uncomfortable about it. This is real life tragedy arranged in thumbnail-sized rows. I'm here today to attract an audience for my little blog: which tragically damaged person shall I choose? I head back to iPhoto for pictures that I've taken of fall leaves.

It occurs to me that Google Image Search is quite different from what Shakespeare's buddies might have done with his famous stage direction, with which he kills off Antigonus in Act III of The Winter's Tale. Maybe a person dressed in a bear suit. Some thrillingly muffled cries from off stage. Some people say they might have used a real bear from the London bear-pits, but it is highly unlikely that it was actually tearing any human flesh. Then again, the Romans did exactly that, didn't they? For centuries, the gladiators engaged in -- or were forced to engage in -- death rituals, something like human sacrifice, but with a more sportsmanlike air. And they called that entertainment.

What just happened? This post started so sweetly. It was going to be funny, and entertaining, and you were all going to like me! What have I done to get myself here? A Facebook friend that I don't know very well just posted this update, which seems relevant:

WHY ARE PEOPLE SOOOOOO DRAMATIC?? WHHYYYY SO CRAAAZY via Mobile Web

I don't think we can really blame the internet for that.

But it does happen, on occasion, that you wonder whether or not your web content is interesting. A couple of hours ago I went through and changed some post titles with just that question in mind. I had some boring post titles, and I don't like boring things. I imagine you don't like boring things, either. What I'm going for here is not fiction, though. This is exactly what really happened, except...more so. I'm thinking now of the Real World, in which the high-drama clashes between roommates are completely real. They're real people having real problems. All we did was point them towards each other, in a television arena. And we promised them fame and glory in return. Kind of like gladiators.

This is the hue and cry that was once raised over reality TV, which is arguably fairly seamless with reality Internet, which is viral videos of someone's child almost dying in front of a subway train. Some people are concerned about the well being of the individuals who trade away their realities for their 30 minutes of fame. Later deprived of the lime light, they might do something completely crazy, like invent a giant balloon and pretend their child has flown away in it. Others are concerned about the spectators, or at least -- like Tertullian condemning the patrons of the Roman amphitheater -- about their souls.

Now I'm getting my history books down off the top shelf and preparing to have discussion with people who know more about this than I do. "Tertullian? You brought up Tertullian?!" But I feel confident that I can defend this one position: we have not suddenly become bloodthirsty. Nor were we bloodthirsty for only a short period of time during a unique and bygone era. The desire for horror in entertainment persists. Beowulf, for example, was a sordid little tale, full of bone crunching and otherwise similar t0 Grand Theft Auto.

The internet did not create our attraction to disaster. But by virtue of its ability to distribute information, it is keeping us in nearly unlimited supply. The internet specializes in information access. On the one hand, we have access to the information. On the other hand, the information has access to us. I used to have monsters under my bed. Now I have them in my computer.

About a year ago I moved my email from aol to gmail, and in the process I stopped seeing the "AOL News" on a more-than-daily basis. Now, when I go back every once in while to check for lost emails, I am shocked by the tabloid-style headlines. Today, of course, the DC sniper's execution; yesterday, an over-stressed mom who overdosed on alcohol, drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway (that's on the way to my brother's place in Westchester) and killed four children and four adults. The actual email page loads notoriously slowly. I'm not the one who can tell you whether that has to do with clunky programming, or a targeted bid for advertising revenue. But either way, that slow load gives you plenty of time in which to click on those sordid headlines, to pick up the tabloid from the check out aisle, to be voluntarily inundated with crystal clear, high-pixel images of the absolute worst things done by the absolute worst people anywhere in the world on this particular day.

Anxiety disorder, anyone? I'll take just a small one, thank you.

Niche Market News, or, How The Sky Got a Crack In It

It was about six months ago that it fully dawned on me that my sister and I are getting different news. Dolly was sitting with me at my kitchen table, with some of the coffee cake that I always make (that she later taught me would stay moist longer with 1/3 of a cup of applesauce in the batter), and she was talking about tea parties.

I don't know if she could tell this at the time, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Tea parties? British high tea? I was a little distracted by my heavy pregnancy -- the very day before Stella was born -- and I had a momentary image of a friend's three-year-old daughter serving me plastic doughnuts.

My sister continued, "It's hard to see that as anything but bias. When that many people come to a protest and the media doesn't cover it at all. That's a bias."

I didn't hear what she said next. Instead I transformed her accusation into its shadow: a claim that her preferred news sources are somehow not biased, while mine are. This shadow claim -- the thing that Dolly didn't say but, I imagined, she must have meant -- is so absurd and strange that I stopped listening.

Media bias? My sister, who is a card carrying member of the Christian right, is talking to me about media bias?

As we always do, my sister and I continued our conversation in perfect civility until one or the other of us changed the subject, and we still get along just fine, even though we remain politically minded and pretty much diametrically opposed. But I didn't learn anything about the tea parties.

It was more than a month later, near July 4, that the phenomenon of tea parties finally made its way into my news stream, and I came to realize that they were gatherings of political conservatives convened to protest various financial policies of the current administration.

Maybe I wouldn't have been interested anyway. I'm a garden variety bleeding heart, by which I mean that my alliances are forged along the lines of social issues, and financial policy concerns would have a hard time coming near enough to unseat my convictions. But my greatest conviction of all has to do with clear vision, in this case, the ability to hear, and on that front I had experienced a failure.

And the most maddening part of this particular failure? Is that I don't even watch television news, which I'm pretty sure is the sector of media my sister was critiquing. So what was I defending? I don't watch TV at all. And neither does my sister. We both read our news...on the internet.

In different places on the internet, clearly. The phrase "niche market" comes to mind, and I'm remembering how my brother Dan, who is a businessman, explained this to me. On the internet there is financial reward for gathering what would once have been considered a puny audience. If you can gather a thousand people, a couple of thousand people, you're doing all right. A generation ago, nobody would have kept creating content for that small of a market. It would have been too expensive. It wouldn't have made money. It wouldn't have worked.

But now it does work. And as a result, even in circles of people who wear the same political stripes, it can take a few minutes to get on the same page. I listen to NPR. She's watching CNN. He's reading Slate. And even though many of us still read the New York Times (in my liberal-ish circles, obviously), we are using our browsers to scan that huge paper for the particular articles we're looking for.

Welcome to the age of consumer-driven news. I can search the internet for the position statement that most closely matches my vision of the world, for the evidence that supports my already-formed conclusion. And with as little effort as type-type-type-click-click-scan-scan, I will almost certainly find it. It wants to be found.

Quite a few years ago now, I worked as a stage manager on a play written and directed by a San Diego radio personality. The play was a simplified and humor-ized rendition of that disc jockey's life and career, with great pop hits and a twenty-five foot turntable. It ended each night with a montage of television news footage of the most significant events in the prior thirty years of San Diego's history, ramping through the devastating crash of PSA Flight 182 on its way to the fall of the Twin Towers. That house held 414 people. It was packed every show. And every show there was a collective mourning, a together mourning, as they relived these horrific events writ large on the projection screen in front of them.

I couldn't have anything to do with it. Maybe I genuinely needed to maintain emotional distance in order to be effective in my job. Maybe I'm just weak. But every night I invited the stage crew to open their headset microphones, asking them to cease their wonderfully breezy and distracting conversation only moments before the closing sequence, in which, as the second of the two towers collapsed again into that living cloud of dust, I would call the projection screen to black, and the turntable back around to its final position.

I can't exactly remember the lines that were spoken then, by these DJ characters with their funny names, as the stage lights came up to a theater sized replica of a grieving nation. The truth of those words was too bald for me to really appreciate it at the time, and I would guess the insight was also lost to most of the audience. But what was said went something like this:

"When you turn on your radio in the morning, what you really want to know...is that you're not alone."

To the hundreds of fans of a single radio show, seated shoulder to shoulder in that darkened room, that was a rallying cry. It was a celebration of their togetherness in the face of unimaginable tragedy. But to me, it just made me feel more lonely. I wasn't a part of that group. I couldn't be a part of that group. I couldn't buy what that particular DJ had to sell.

Once again, I find myself thinking of the world less in terms of left and right and more in terms of in and out. "Do you believe what They are telling you?" so many of us ask, every day. The thing that differs -- widely! -- is who we think "They" is. "They" could be the Communists or it could be the President. It could be a pastor or it could be an environmental scientist. It could be the corporations, or the United Nations, or talk radio, or your sister, or the network news.

This is our culture now, this dogged pursuit of our deceivers -- even to the extent that an elected Representative calls out, "That's a lie!" to the President during a joint session of Congress. In this, he is accurately representing his constituency. We all believe that somebody is lying.

I felt this deeply as I recently drove across the center of the country, letting my radio dial meander across the band and hearing, in succession, fully opposite statements presented equally as truth. What is this doing to our minds? When you can sit there with another person, and you know they're not crazy, and you know you aren't crazy -- at least, you weren't yesterday -- but you're finding that their understanding of reality is different from yours? That they're literally living in a different world?

When we talk about the political polarization of recent years, I believe this is what we're talking about. I don't have reason to believe that our legislative representatives are drifting apart from one another. From my humble single-point perspective, all five hundred and thirty five of them continue to have more in common with each other than they do with me.

But we are becoming more polarized. Across these ideological chasms -- the culture wars, the mommy wars, the political wars -- we are less likely to have shared experiences: less likely to have heard the same program, read the same book, admired the same public figure, or dreamed the same dream. And as we surf the internet each day, we can feel our reality shifting, just a tiny bit, depending on in which universe we land.

I don't blame the internet for all this. It is a reflection of changing culture as much as it is a cause of it. But I do feel the need to aggressively reach out, at least to a few people. Maybe just to my one Republican sister. Or even to people whose political values are similar to mine, but have heard me focus on the minute differences in our thinking instead of digging hard into the human souls we have in common.

And I find that, on occasion, I close my computer and look up and out at the real sky, which doesn't have any cracks in it at all and wonder, what on earth am I talking about? These dire imaginings, all these concerns, however poetic they might appear on my computer screen, can hardly stand to the challenge of a real November wind.