Haiti quake brings dose of reality

Gregory Rodriguez

I don't know about you, but images of the tragedy in Haiti made me feel pretty silly about having paid so much attention recently to Tiger Woods' sex life, Harry Reid's gaffes or Conan O'Brien's future. There's nothing like real pain and suffering to make us realize that the stuff we tend to obsess about can be pretty meaningless.

I was interviewing a writer in a hotel lobby in Bucharest, Romania, last October, when he glanced at the CNN coverage of the "balloon boy" aftermath and interrupted himself to ask, "Is that what you people in America care about?"

Yes, I confessed, and tried my best to explain the connection between our frenzied response to mostly meaningless, manufactured dramas and bungee jumping.

In relatively strifeless, wealthy, stable democracies, we seek to add an element of excitement to our predictable lives by, say, jumping off Colorado's Royal Gorge Bridge attached to a rubberized cord. We engage, in other words, in ritualized, controlled risk-taking to make us feel like we are really alive. And taking sides in trumped-up controversies, or just watching a less-than-earthshaking disaster unfold, is a similar civic phenomenon. In a nation where individual isolation is becoming the order of the day, ritualized contention and alarm over almost anything make us feel like we're connected, part of something important and in the thick of things.

This is especially true with most political scandals. You could say that all the moral outrage over a politician's sex life or slip of the tongue lets us think we make a difference in the halls of power. As UC Santa Cruz sociologist Andrew Szasz puts it, these recurrent episodes are a little like professional wrestling. Like a WWE match, scandals demand a suspension of disbelief, "this time in the phoniness of what passes daily for democratic participation. One is rewarded with the feeling of witnessing and being swept up in important political events. Nonparticipation is replaced for the moment by exciting, spectator participation."

And the end result? The public feels good about its involvement, the political system is stabilized, and the hard issues go on as ignored as ever.

 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols