Take a look at the opening page of the more popular Internet news sites, such as Yahoo or MSN. There will be a few small links to the news portion, usually having to do with a Bush policy, the presidential election and conflict in the Middle East.
Right underneath the news, in a place much more colorful and eye-catching, you will usually find sports, and then entertainment, where you are regaled with Super Bowl highlights and Janet Jackson’s mammary glands.
Considering that most people have to break out the map to find Kuwait every time the continual fighting there makes the news, it is not surprising when two of the top search topics on MSN are “Super Bowl halftime” and “Oscar nominations.”
We have become a society that, since the introduction of full war coverage on television, wishes to hide and distance itself from painful images. It’s understandable, and I am guilty of it, but our numbing diversions are taking up too much of our time and energy, to the exclusion of everything else.
Remember back to the Clinton years. What immediately springs to mind? That’s right. The sex scandal. When the international mess we’ve gotten ourselves into today, the only thing we could hear about or were worried about was Lewinski and the uncalled-for fixation on her stained dress.
What resulted was a huge melodrama that embarrassed me for the United States. But I wasn’t so much embarrassed by Clinton’s actions as I was by the sensationalism and obsessive fixation on the president’s sex life.
Even coverage of serious international issues in today’s news has become shrouded by making the world seem like a John Wayne movie-both his westerns and his war movies.
Either the scenario is an old-fashioned shoot-out between Bush and Hussein, in which Bush is destined to win because he is the “good guy,” or the camera focuses on a single female POW being saved, turning it into an inspiring hero story.
That’s where our mentality comes from. The movies. Television. We may not be able to name world leaders, but we know who’s dating Britney Spears.
Movies and television have always provided us with a numbing escapism. They either try to show a more pleasant world or a more glamorous or exciting world. Everything ties neatly in the end.
We become so accustomed to this rose-colored way of looking at life that we want life to imitate art. We’re uncomfortable when it doesn’t.
The world is not that simple, as any professor will tell you. This is a world of pain and moral ambiguity. We have just trained ourselves or have been trained into not seeing it.
When the only thing we can talk about is a staged flashing during a sporting event, there is a problem. When students miss class after class because they are waiting in line for a ticket to a sporting event, there is a problem.
We all need to realize that the sum of our lives is not defined by television and athletics. We need to occasionally turn off the television and talk to the people we’ve been living with all our lives.
I am not purporting that entertainment and athletics do not have a place in our lives. They do. Occasionally we do need to wind down and turn on the boob tube just to keep everything from getting us down. But we also need to keep things in perspective and find what’s important.
Who knows? Maybe if people actually started doing that, we might never see Janet Jackson’s breast again. We can only hope.
Angela Adair is a junior English major. She can be reached at [email protected].