Friday, September 06, 2002
Grief porn. You want to stop seeing the images of September 11, 2001. You want to turn away from the spectacle of grief. You want not to hear another heart-rending story.
And yet you must. The prurient urge to watch it all again will be tempted over and over and over for the next five days. Television gives us what little there is left of a sense of national community, of epic tragedy, of human loss. It pays such shallow tribute that these catastrophes which eclipsed our imaginations for the last year must be relived through such a paltry, irresistible medium as TV, but maybe that's the only way we can reinvigorate the memory of those lost.
I remember the couple of days following the attacks as the only times I felt that television approached anything resembling honesty. Within a week, the standard manipulations (elegiac musical themes, flag-draped graphics, wiping of tears from cheeks in dramatic slow motion) had returned with full force, and cheapened the titanic emotions we all felt.
My fear now is that a new sophistication among television producers will amplify the artificial poignancy to new heights, while the genuine poignancy will remain locked away, grieving, in millions of beating hearts, invisible and mute as the souls we lost.
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Greatest Hits
· Alternatives to First Command Financial Planning
· First Command, last resort, Part 3
· Part 2
· Part 1
· Stealing $50K from a widow: Wells Real Estate
· Leo Wells, REITs and divine wealth
· Sex-crazed Red State teenagers
· What I hate: a manifesto
· Spawn of Darleen Druyun
· All-American high school sex party
· Why is Ken Lay smiling?
· Poppy's Enron birthday party
· The Saudi money laundry and the president's uncle
· The sentence of Enron's John Forney
· The holiness of Neil Bush's marriage
· The Silence of Cheney: a poem
· South Park Christians
· Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett
· Fastow childen vs. Enron children
· Give your prescription money to your old boss
· Neil Bush, hard-working matchmaker
· Republicans against fetuses and pregnant women
· Emboldened Ken Lay
· Faith-based jails
· Please die for me so I can skip your funeral
· A brief illustrated history of the Republican Party
· Nancy Victory
· Soldiers become accountants
· Beware the Merrill Lynch mob
· Darleen Druyun's $5.7 billion surprise
· First responder funding
· Hoovering the country
· First Command fifty percent load
· Ken Lay and the Atkins diet
· Halliburton WMD
· Leave no CEO behind
· August in Crawford
· Elaine Pagels
· Profitable slave labor at Halliburton
· Tom Hanks + Mujahideen
· Sharon & Neilsie Bush
· One weekend a month, or eternity
· Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait?
· Cheney's war
· Seth Glickenhaus: Capitalist against Bush
· Martha's blow job
· Mark Belnick: Tyco Catholic nut
· Cheney's deferred Halliburton compensation
· Jeb sucks sugar cane
· Poindexter & LifeLog
· American Family Association panic
· Riley Bechtel and the crony economy
· The Book of Sharon (Bush)
· The Art of Enron
· Plunder convention
· Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner
· What's an Army private worth?
· Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad
· Sneaky bastards at Halliburton
· Golf course and barbecue military strategy
· Enron at large
· Recent astroturf
· Cracker Chic 2
· No business like war business
· Big Brother
· Martha Stewart vs. Thomas White
· Roger Kimball, disappointed Republican poetry fan
· Cheney, Lay, Afghanistan
· Terry Lynn Barton, crimes of burning
· Feasting at the Cheney trough
· Who would Jesus indict?
· Return of the Carlyle Group
· Duct tape is for little people
· GOP and bad medicine
· Sears Tower vs Mt Rushmore
· Scared Christians
· Crooked playing field
· John O'Neill: The man who knew
· Back to the top
 
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