Oh how perfectly delightful, disgusting and depressing. Thank you, Lord, for this, thy bounty.Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, host of the 700 Club and noted speaker of all things ludicrous, asserts on his television program that the United States should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The mainstream media then proceeds to make it a story.This is something that deserves little more than to be laughed at as it spins around the toilet bowl of the blogosphere, but it became headline news.What now? Poke at Robertson a bit with my pitchfork? Serve up some cheese to go with my whine regarding the third-grade maturity of the media as it yet again promotes another story of approximately zero importance?No, such thoughts would be as useful as noting that McKinley Avenue looks different this semester.Here’s a better idea. Instead of lamenting the abysmal state of much of the popular media — the unholy trinity of cable news networks in particular — one should adjust one’s media diet. For $8.25 a month, you can have delivered to your door six days a week a world-class newspaper like The Financial Times. Or for $26, you can get a whole semester’s worth of The New York Times five days a week from the bookstore in the Atrium. That can be augmented with a diverse selection of intelligent magazines like The New Yorker, The Economist, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard. And, of course, the Internet offers plenty of options.There you go. No reason to complain about the Natalee-Holloway-runaway-bride-BTK-Killer-Terri-Schiavo-obsessed media. It’s gone. You’re no longer strapped down “A Clockwork Orange”-style and required to view 17 hours of CNN a day.But that’s only the beginning. There are many fine whines that one needn’t uncork and get wasted on. For instance, our society has elevated Paris Hilton to the status of golden goddess, even though she has not contributed anything of value to our world. So what? Ignore her. In the universe I inhabit, she does not exist.This was a weak summer for movies. So what? I haven’t seen all the movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman ... and you probably haven’t either. There exist more great films than you could ever watch, and many of them can be borrowed for free from the library. The world is filled with things that will absolutely annoy you if you allow them to, but why would any sane person want to do that?It’s like someone placing his hand on a hot stove, then yelling, “This stove is burning my hand! Ow! It hurts!” It seems so obvious, but most people never do it — people just don’t move their hands off the fiery idiocy that is so much of human experience, society and American popular culture. They seem to think that they have to sit there and scream about it, write books about it and blog about it.And it should be noted, if one leaves a hand on the stove for too long, it will become so burned, scarred and deformed that it will be all but useless.We all have the ability to build our own reality; yet, so many of us have willingly turned over construction duties to others who are all too happy to build a Xanadu of tabloid triviality. After a glance at my WWPRD bracelet, I have a suggestion: It’s time to take out the foreman.To cast off the metaphors, change your actions and behaviors instead of staying in a state where things irritate you. In the name of Jesus the Assassin, Amen.
Write to David at
Swimminginbrokenglass@gmail.com
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