CSotD: And never a word God said
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I went through a raft of Boston Marathon cartoons this morning thinking I would end up leading with Nast, since the messages all seemed kind of mundane. Yes, we're sad. And, yeah, we'd like to find out who did it.
I already had Nast on my mind when I came to Matt Wuerker's take and found we apparently had some of the same thoughts.
No, no, nothing about "the lamestream media."
First of all, if you believe in some grand corporate conspiracy beyond the transparent manipulations of Fox and Murdoch, you're simply following a different Pied Piper into the river.
Second, the hipsters who use terms like "lamestream media" and disparage "dead trees" and see the Koch Brothers behind every disappointing news report are also the ones whose obsessive love for the right-here-right-now is pushing the obsessive 24/7 non-coverage that Wuerker (properly) calls a farce.
(By the way, the reference is from Karl Marx.)
There was a bit of strange timing, in that the Denver Post, for which I freelance, received a Pulitzer for their breaking-news coverage of the Aurora theater shootings on the same day as the Boston bombing. Which I suspect means that, unless they change the timing of their announcement, someone is going to get a breaking news Pulitzer for the Boston bombing more or less on its anniversary.
The Post soft-pedaled the award, with the news director saying "The only thing worse than having to cover a story like this would be to not step up for your community." The newspaper also donated the $10,000 that comes with the award to a local mental health facility and a local blood bank.
Coverage matters. People need to know what has happened. But they need competent coverage, and it's like those signs you sometimes see in small restaurants that say "Fast food is not good. Good food is not fast."
As it happens, I was in Denver when the Aurora shootings occurred. We hold a pair of one-day workshops for young writers each July, one for anybody who signs up, one for our actual youth reporting staff. I had to explain to the kids in the Friday workshop that the promised reporter and photographer from the news department would not be there, since they were tied up covering the shootings and its aftermath.
Which is how news works. But we went back to my boss's house that night to face a stream of wall-to-wall talking heads on all local TV stations, replaying the video clips, replaying interviews with survivors, replaying interviews with authorities, replaying the video some more, replaying interviews with friends and relatives of survivors, replaying the video.
You feel like an insensitive schmuck if you turn away from it, but, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no there there.
There is no "news" to report, but they also don't want to look like insensitive schmucks, so they sit there repeating the same stuff over and over and over.
And here we are again. The Boston stations have different clips and different interviews, but the rest is pretty much the same.
It is, unfortunately, part of this wonderful, new, innovative, modern 24-hour newscycle.
Well, not entirely new. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, my brother was news director of his college radio station. He was well aware, of course, that, once anyone heard the news, they were going to head for the network coverage rather than stick around to find out what he knew, which wasn't much.
But he recognized that, college students being college students, it was entirely possible that someone would flip on the college station not knowing what had happened in Dallas. So he stayed on the story, repeating whatever was on the wire, fully expecting that nobody would stick with him for more than 10 minutes at the longest.
A half-century later, that's what everybody is doing, except they want you to stick around in case they happen to come up with any breaking news, most of which seems to be shot down within a few hours after it turns out not to actually be, well, true.
So in fact, it's sort of the opposite: No TV station or website today is saying, "We don't know what's going on. You should go find someone who does."
But thank god for the limited capacity of print, whose slow pace increases the chances of getting it right, as long as they don't succumb to the temptation to vomit everything they hear onto their website and sort it out later.
That's a temptation we didn't always face, which brings us to Thomas Nast:
This was Nast's cartoon for Harper's Weekly, upon the death of James Garfield.
The outstanding and nearly irreproducible aspect of this cartoon is that the woman is Columbia, Nast's most common symbol of the nation. But she was normally shown in helmet and breastplate, with shield and either spear or sword, a tall, confident, protective and somewhat stern warrior goddess.
For his readers, the contrast is stunning and sums up the tragedy of the moment as no weeping Statue of Liberty could. (That less formidable symbol not having entered the cartooning lexicon anyway, the statue being still new in 1881.)
I don't know that any current cartoonist has created a character so capable of this affecting reversal. Trudeau comes closest, but the whimsical nature of Doonesbury — not to mention the time lag — argues against the same impact.
Yes, webcomics can respond more quickly, but have neither the audience nor the gravitas Nast had established for his work and certainly not both.
But when I used to show this cartoon in presentations to students, the other thing I brought up was that it was the culmination of a 10-week death watch.
Can you imagine what CNN would have done with that?
A lot of people know Chevy Chase's catch-phrase "General Francisco Franco is still dead," but to get the joke, you have to be old enough to remember how network news followed his slow shuffle from this mortal coil, which became a nightly feature of network newscasts. And he wasn't even our leader.
We'd have had all-Garfield, all-the-time even back then, before the web and when "cable television" was WTBS and WGN and that station in California that showed movies and sold waterbeds all night.
But without electronic media, in a world of deadlines, people weren't standing around waiting to hear how Garfield was doing.
They were working in the fields or the mines or the factories, they were going to school, they were churning butter and taking all day to do the laundry, but mostly, they were living their own lives in their own communities, and Washington, DC, was kind of a distant abstraction.
I'm sure they cared about the president's condition and it was probably a frequent topic. But it was a twice daily update, and then only if you bought both newspapers, which I suppose you might in such a time of crisis.
And, if you happened to live in town, you might get updates on a chalkboard outside the newspaper office. If he died, they'd probably ring some bells or fire a cannon. Or maybe not.
The next morning, the details would be in your newspaper. Or maybe the day after, depending on how the deadlines fell.
Thank god for deadlines.
And, to cast the process back another 20 years from Garfield, here's a childhood memory from Katharine Lee Bates, of a slow-paced, yet not so different, age:
When Lincoln Died
A five-year old in a Cape Cod village, twenty miles from the rail,
Falmouth, Falmouth, loveliest Falmouth,
Wearing her silvery, pearl-embroidered ocean mist for a veil;
Her sweet God's Acre a windsome garden whither often would weepers bear
Their gifts of flowers, dear dooryard flowers,
To pale stones carved with a ship or anchor, though no mound was molded there;
For many a Falmouth man lay dreaming under seas of dazzling blue
Mid the rosewhite coral, the rosepink coral,
And some in the Arctic ice were shrouded, and the tomb of some none knew.
A five-year old on the side porch holding a fold of her mother's dress,
Mother, Mother, our fair young Mother,
Shaking the breakfast cloth with a flourish of her own gay gallantness.
And across the yard, in her narrow doorway, the neighbor I held in dread,
Venomous neighbor, witch of a neighbor,
Lean and gray, with a furtive pussy that the boys called Copperhead.
Yet I loved her grandson, a pygmy urchin with black eyes glittering sly,
Impish playmate, my earliest playmate,
Whose quick red mouth would snap at and swallow the bewildered buzz of a fly.
She shrilled across: "They've shot Abe Lincoln, He's dead and I'm glad he's dead."
Lincoln! Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!
She stood and laughed, that terrible woman, and never a word God said.
Back into the kitchen my mother staggered, her face all strange and blanched,
Her deep eyes filling, filling and brimming
With tears that the tablecloth kept so sacred from childish weeping stanched.
"I will not believe it. I'll not believe it," she sobbed till with drooping head
An old sea-captain, a whaler captain
Off the stage-coach swung with a Boston paper that from house to house he read.
I heard it and hid me under the lilacs this mystery to prod.
Lincoln! Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!
And not one angel to catch the bullet! What had become of God?
A robin beyond me hopped and chirruped where the April grasses blew,
As if Lincoln, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln
Were no more than the worm he tugged at and swallowed. I lamented that long worm, too.
Then our lonely village among the sand dunes with only its one scant store,
Yet part of a nation, a stricken nation,
Took thought how to honor our saint, our martyr, our hero forevermore.
Wonted to grief, the women of Falmouth hung the old church, pulpit and walls,
With a simple mourning, a sacred mourning,
Already steeped in uttermost anguish, hung it with widow's shawls.
The flag on the village green half-masted, bell tolling upon the air,
Lincoln, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln,
The nation's sorrow I felt my sorrow, for my mother's shawl was there.
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