Mourning Becomes Entertainment - The Travesty at the Winter Olympics

Mourning becomes Entertainment


Am I the only person in the world who believes that Olympic skater Joannie Rochette should not have performed on the Olympic stage following the untimely death of her mother?

I do not blame the young woman. She, I’m sure, wanted to honor her mother through her performance. I blame her handlers, and NBC. They knew that this poignant bit of drama would raise the visibility of the event and I’m sure did all they could to encourage her to get back on the ice.

When someone close to you dies, the right thing to do is to withdraw in solitude with your family and mourn quietly. She is young. There will be other contests and other Olympics for her. But to perform when the grief is so raw and immediate, when the body is not buried, is simply unthinkable. Have we morphed into a culture so enamored with the notion that performance is all and that the show should always go on that we cannot conceive of a decent interval of grieving?

Instead, the Olympics audience became no different than bystanders at an auto accident, gawking at someone in deep pain, getting a phony catharsis out of the tears of a young woman we neither know nor truly care about.

The Greeks distinguished between bathos and pathos. Bathos was grief that we feel when stirred up by triggers – like the image of a young woman weeping on ice. Pathos is when we experience those emotions after having earned them. The world cannot really share the grief of this young skater; they did not know her or her mother. They are not her family. For the audience to witness and feel this “sadness” was to get unearned catharsis. It was, “entertainment” for us. And it should not have happened.

Racism's Hidden Legacy

Last week, the historian John Hope Franklin died. His obituaries have told the story of a man well deserving of fame, an African-American historian whose ground-breaking work documented the history of slavery in the United States, and the impact of racism on American life. He grew up in an era when his library research in small towns throughout the South subjected him to indifference, to being relegated away from "whites only" tables at the libraries, not being able to be helped by a white female librarian, a litany of indignities that might have broken the spirit of a lesser scholar. But Franklin persisted, living to see his work recognized, to serve as a professor at some of the country's most distinguished universities, to help shape the Supreme Court arguments that ended school segregation, and ultimately to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Blessed with a long life, he witnessed, at age 94, the election of An African-American president.
It had been a long journey. A year before his death, Franklin recalled a chilldhood incident in an interview with his father as part of NPR's Story Corps. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102401101&ft=1&f=1003
Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he had been an ardent and eager boy scout and took very seriously the the scout's mission to do a good deed everyday. Spotting a frail blind woman with a cane needing help crossing the street, he rushed to her aid. Gallantly offering her his harm, he guided her across the street, as the two exchanged pleasantries. Suddenly, the woman's tone changed and she asked him whether he was white or black. When Franklin told her, she immediately told him, "take your filthy hands off me."
As cruel as this anecdote was, all I can imagine is what could have happened. What if after leaving the woman in the middle of the street, she was struck by a car, and Franklin had been blamed for tricking her and causing her death? What if an all-white jury sentenced him to years in juvenile detention? What if that spirit and talent had been crushed before it ever bloomed?
That's the thing about racism. We know the people who prevailed despite all the obstacles. What we will never know is the people who never got the chance to fulfill their destinies and fulfill their promise because racism blighted them as completely and permanently as an insidious worm can burrow into a seedling and rot it from the inside.

Overstimulated and under-informed

It is now spring. And if the business on a Friday night in Pentagon City Mall http://www.simon.com/MALL/default.aspx?ID=157outside Washington, DC is any indication, perhaps the winter of our fear and discontent is giving way to a hope as subtle as the crocuses peeping up everywhere. People are resilient and find ways to cope, even in very difficult times. More and more people are ignoring the headlines, and living their lives, consumed with their own household economy much more than with the larger economy. It is instructive that by media accounts, President Obama took no questions about the AIG bonuses from the crowds in California. Yes, there was a lot of outrage, and it was justified, about those bonuses. But a lot of people don’t have time to react to these events. They want to keep their jobs and homes and take care of their kids, and that consumes most of their brain activity. Not a lot a spare synapses for outrage.

The thing that is so worrisome about this story and all the economy stories is the lack of history, context and explanation, and the absolutely ghastly job the media does covering Congress. On February 12, the Associated Press reported that the amendment offered by Senators Ron Wyden (D-WY) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) had been stripped from the final version of the stimulus bill. A month ago, when media attention might have done some good and caused Congress and the Administration to reconsider what they had done and its political and fiscal implications, the media were not at home. No, reporters

didn’t really pay attention to stimulus bonuses for several weeks, not until AIG started paying them out. Having failed to call attention to the problem weeks ago, the media overcompensated, focusing obsessively on this bright shiny object in its line of vision, just as the Treasury Secretary is try to coax private lenders back into a public-private partnership to help solve the foreclosure crisis. And in the huge media echo-chamber, the bailout bonus anger reverberates on itself, with the media covering the outrage it triggered and then reporting on how the outrage has gotten out of hand and may impede the recovery.

I happened upon an interesting magazine from Britain recently, Psychologies, www.psychologies.co.uk which has the design ethos of a fashion magazine but a lot of content inside about a whole range of issues dealing with various aspects of the human spirit and psyche. In England, I discovered one is not laid off, but the target of a redundancy. I don’t know which makes you feel better. Being laid off has a certain note of violence to it – like being put down. Being made redundant, however, seems more shameful – that somehow what you do is duplicative or unimportant. I think I prefer being laid off.

Anyway in a story about coping with the economy, a British sociologist contended that the media tends to exaggerate and increase fear. Frank Furedi, a British sociologist, wrote Culture of Fear Revisited to discuss our excessive fear of terrorism in a Post-9-11 world. But now, people are coming to Furedi to ask about our fears of economic collapse. Indeed, when you Google the title of his book, you find it listed on the credit-mortgage-news website. In a recent interview with Psychologies, Furedi in part blamed the hyperventilated syntax of the media – its constant words of doomsday words like crashes and meltdowns – for this constant state of anxiety about economic well-being. A constant state of anxiety simply is no way to live and no way to rebound.

The media has no pause button. Now largely reported by very young journalists with no sense of history, and never taught to think critically, the news is a mishmash of facts interspersed with lots of quotes from “experts”, often sautéed in cynicism, which is far different from skepticism. We should always be skeptical in the pronouncements of government officials and others. But that skepticism drives us to pore over the reports to find the information the government failed to highlight, or to seek out contrarians but responsible, not politically motivated, views. Cynicism is what sophomores do – simply deride or ridicule anything on their plate, or go for the wisecrack or putdown. It’s easy and it makes you look like you’re an “independent” journalist when all you are is a teenage trying to do an adult’s job.

The Great Depression's priceless earmark

If you are lucky enough to live or work in Washington, DC, seek out The National Portrait Gallery. http://www.npg.si.edu/

The gallery is a particularly comforting place on a late afternoon on Fridays, when it's nearly empty, and the man who greets you at the front desk is full of stories about the history of the building, formerly, the nation's patent office, and before that a Civil War hospital, and before that, the site of an enormous inaugural ball for President Lincoln. Right now, there is a wonderful exhibit of government-funded art that Roosevelt commissioned as part of his jobs stimulus plan in the 1930s. Anyone who thinks that funding the arts to create jobs is just funding wasteful "earmarks," should visit this exhibit. It reveals so clearly and eloquently that even in the most difficult times life and joy emerge. Italian immigrants celebrate feast days with Madonnas and swing bands in a down-at-the-heels New York City slum. African-American cotton pickers stand erect from their labors and show beauty and self-respect. A new immigrant captures the drama of a metropolitan subway car. Thousands of artists earned their daily bread painting ordinary Americans trying to get by. Not only did the federal funds buy their financial survival, they brought the rest of us a priceless legacy. If this is an earmark, let them rain down on us!

Hope among the ruins

I used to work in a lovely modest little office building on Eye Street in Washington, close to the White House. The building was likely more than 40 years old, and had a few quirks: a slow-moving elevator, and carpet that could have used replacing in spots. But the street views were lovely. And it had, miraculously, a mail slot - something hard to find in post-911 DC in many new buildings.

But a group of speculators bought the building, evicted the tenants and tore it down. It was reckless wanton destruction - as reckless and wanton as all the speculation that pulled us into an economic tailspin. Their plan was to building a glitzy new office building. But they got caught by the credit freeze, I assume. Because nearly a year after the demolition, only a crater stands where our little building stood.

I am not happy that we're in a deep recession. But perhaps this downturn will shake up the people who feel that we have no need to hang on to what is modest and good in an endless search for what is bigger and presumably better.

I grow hopeful when I think about what happened last weekend.
It was a bitterly cold Sunday evening in Alexandria, Virginia. But the upper room of Trattoria de Franco http://www.trattoria-dafranco.com/ was warm and welcoming. Each table, covered with a white tablecloth, contained an open bottle of chianti, wine and water glasses, and a pitcher of water. At the front of the room was a small stage and a piano. It was opera night at the cozy Italian restaurant, and the crowd was awaiting a good performance. Many of those in the room were retirees. As we all waited in the buffet line, they exhibited gallows humor, cracking jokes about diminished IRAs and reduced prospects. "It's all my fault," one older women said, "I retired last November." There was humor in that room, but there was fear, and uncertainty. These were people whose lives were not what they expected, and they weren't sure how everything was going to turn out. And yet, they were there, paying $55 per person to dine with their friends and here three professional singers perform a medley of well-known arias by Puccini and Rossini and Mozart, and a little Gershwin, and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen as well. The pianist was late, but the singers adapted.
How to describe the mood of the place? Cheerful with an undercurrent of anxiety. Good-natured with a soupcon of stoicism. Something I'd never experienced before.
At the end of the evening, the singers borrowed from theRogers and Hammerstein muscial "Carousel," and closed with "You'll Never Walk Alone."
I never much liked that song. Thought the lyrics a little over the top and verging into bathos. But last Sunday night, as the crowd sang along, that song suddenly took on new meaning.

Walk on, through the wind
Walk on, through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone

A deficit of dreams

If I were advising the President, I would tell him that the deficit he really should be addressing is the dream deficit. We have become a nation of grim plodders, looking behind us to see if our job is still around, checking our 401ks each day, grimly watching the value of our homes turn to dust. What has happened to the hope of the presidential campaign? What has happened to the man who delivered that hope? He is so focused on getting things done, and making our expectations realistic, that he is failing to deliver the one thing we elected him for: A sense of calm and confidence, a belief that the world can be better, that we can be better.
Where did the hope go? Why doesn't he tell us that no one can predict the future, that the astronomical value of our homes was not realistic, that the exuberant bubble of the stock market was bound to burst, and that we're now in reset mode? But reset can unleash creativity, and help us think about old problems in new ways. It can change what we value and how we live our lives.
It can make us better.
If I were advising the president, I'd have him declare a one-time-only national holiday, "Chill Out Day." This would be a day for everyone to take stock, to hug their kids, and appreciate something in their lives they have not had the time to appreciate.
Then, I'd declare a month to get our national mojo back. I'd declare that no one can predict the future. That somewhere, in some obscure suburban house, some teenager is thinking a thought that may very well create a new industry. That if people rebound from terrible natural disasters, and the destruction of war, that we can rebound, too.
And I'd bring all the creative geniuses I could find and lock them into a room and ask them to brainstorm. We need new solutions. Maybe communities with neighborhoods devastated by foreclosed homes could buy those homes up cheaply with stimulus money and rent them at low rates to firemen, policemen and teachers. Maybe in exchange for affordable housing, those civil servants would accept pay cuts and help retain city jobs and services. Maybe that idea is unworkable from a zillion perspectives, but at least it would get people thinking.
Maybe this is hopelessly naive. But I would choose goofy optimism over mindless gloom. It prevents binge eating. And maybe, just maybe, it can kickstart something good.
And it seems I am not alone in these thoughts. I recommend Richard Florida's article, "How the Crash Will Reshape America" in the March issue of The Atlantic. If I were clever, I would add a link, But not being clever, I will include Florida's thoughtful, and hopeful, conclusion.

The Stanford economist Paul Romer famously said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes. Over the course of the 19th century’s Long Depression, the country remade itself from an agricultural power into an industrial one. After the Great Depression, it discovered a new way of living, working, and producing, which contributed to an unprecedented period of mass prosperity. At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?

If the economy bleeds, it leads

I wish I could teleport myself back to the 1930s, get myself to a newsstand, and pick up a daily newspaper. After the crash of 1929, were the headlines relentlessly bad? Each day, was another family struggling with poverty profiled? And after Roosevelt was elected, did journalists relentlessly question the effectiveness of the New Deal?
The business press is acting like a manic-depressive. It's gone from being the biggest cheerleader of the recklessness that led to the speculative bubble that caused this economic crisis to the loudest harbingers of doom.
No one seems to remember that what reporters report on the economy has an impact on how the economy behaves. I remember being a journalist covering a thrift with an uncertain future. I reached the president of the bank one evening, and his speech was definitely slurred. He sounded like a man who was drinking his insolvency troubles away. I later interviewed that same president, and he reminded me of Nixon during Watergate. Wearing a vested pinstripe suit, he was perspiring heavily, the anxiety practically distorting his face. His pain and unease were palpable. Did I keep all this insight to myself? In the words of a famous vice presidential candidate, "You betcha." I had been schooled by more senior banking reporters who reminded me that when people lose faith in banks, banks lose depositors, and nobody wants to cause a run on the banks. Of course, I reported the what the bank president actually said, and faithfully reported what the thrift's balance sheet looked like. But I kept the drama to myself.
The time has come, I think, when the media ought to take a deep breath, and stop obsessing. Each day the stock market tanks or surges should not be a front-page story. The nightly news does not have to air each day a new feature story about one brave family's struggle with reduced circumstances. I'm not saying this because I lack empathy. I'm saying this because this type of repetitive, totally uninsightful coverage isn't helping. And I think the coverage in part reflects a new media culture that is so absorbed with itself that it fails to see beyond the day's events, and feels no obligation to measure the impact of is work on the communities it serves.
And there is the cynicism that pervades everything. It is almost as if just reporting what happened, or what Congress did, or what the President plans to do, is considered inadequate. The "news" has to accompanied by a greek chorus of commentary and critique. That wouldn't be bad if it came from people with even a modicum of understanding of how legislation actually gets enacted, or how the economy really works. But it rarely aspires to anything more than wrenching the last drop of pessimism and skepticism from any potentially good news.
I wonder whether the quality of the coverage of today's economic collapse is markedly different from the coverage of the 1930s. I know that the journalists of the 1930s were working stiffs. They experienced hard times not from a pinnacle of the privileged looking down, but on an equal footing with the average wage earner. I wonder when Roosevelt started the New Deal, whether they went out of their way to find conservative economists who said that tax cuts were the only way to go and that Roosevelt was destroying the country. I wonder if today's journalists, especially network reporters and anchors, live lives so insulated from average families, that their effort to cover this economic downturn in the grimmest terms possible is simply a gut reaction, an attempt to wrench as much drama and pathos from a news event that is really remote from their own individual reality. As a consequence, there is no reason to report hopeful news, or to tone down the drama of legitimately grave problems. If the economy bleeds, it leads.
My husband would disagree, arguing that this is the first economic downturn that coincides with the terrific wrenching happening in the news business, with newspapers loosing circulation to the Internet, and the entire industry undergoing a profound change that is leading to lots of layoffs and buyouts.
Whatever the cause, all this unrelenting bad news is not helping.
Given this funk the country is in, it is up to the President to get this vision thing going. He should not sugarcoat. But he has to give us a vivid picture of what things will look like when we've turned the corner. We know this will be tough year, but what will 2010 look like? It's like the woman on a diet who buys a dress a size too small so that she can picture how good she will feel when she can fit into it. We need that picture of the new economy. He can tell us this year will be hard and there are struggles ahead. But he has to show us in vivid terms what we're working towards.