Surreality TV

Sept. 21, 2005

“Find it here, only in America’s finest city,” pronounces a robust, middle-aged voice from my car’s stereo about the fun to be had downtown or maybe at a Padres game. I am driving westward on the 8 towards Ocean Beach. In what has for years been locally abbreviated ‘OB’, it is a neighborhood that makes me think of a less intellectual, more experimental version of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Many of the surreptitiously designed beach homes jet out sporadically from behind the corners of equally subtle beach homes. Barking is often overheard due to the adjacent segment of beach reserved for swimming K9s. This small area is aptly titled Dog Beach. This entire mind numbing commingling of hippies, meth-heads, surfers, hounds, various ethnicities, and the errant tourist brews in one spot in San Diego.

San Diego is a great place, it really is. The city and its gorgeous weather practically molest the coastline- a contemporary paradise. Aside from its city council being involved in an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for egregious management of the city’s employee’s pension fund resulting in a billion or so dollar shortfall, along with the quiet preparation of the mayoral run off election, it is truly America’s finest! I arrived here from Philadelphia hoping to secure an elongated experience of the likes I had had on various visits during my college years- a productive, yet bordering apathetic lifestyle that would release me from the frantic east and thrust me into a realm of beach babes and six to eight feet surf. Well, I’ve been here for a while. The only thing I really feel is the hollow vacancy induced by the absence of my friends and family and an unsettling urge to enact upon my road rage. Otherwise, little has changed but the scenery to my script.

It was while pondering this paradox of paradise induced unhappiness that I realized that a lot was going on in the world, at least according to BBC News and Time magazine. There is an unfathomable recovery in store for those in the Gulf region thanks to Hurricane Katrina. Now, there is a second one, only three weeks later, heading for the same spot. She’s called Rita. A wild fire was purportedly set ablaze by a teenage punk in northeastern San Diego County. And on the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings to advise and possibly consent to President Bush nominee Judge John Roberts’ taking over of soon retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the goddamn Chief Justice dies. I can assure you that I followed this meticulously, as though I was merely a subject to the news gods. Still, I invested little in regards to the big picture that was being illuminated so well on the major media news outlets. So, as is usually the result of smoking steady, recreational amounts of pot, I began to look at things not through the scope of pragmatism, but through the eyes of emotion for a glimpse into the smaller picture. The one that comfortably cared for, middle class white folks don’t often view but through the screens of surreality TV.

Attaining some clarity of society’s struggles and conflicts was critical to me because of one aspect- nothing I saw on the news had happened in front of me. I felt as though I was watching a movie preview because, to me, the only news was old news- outside it was sunny and seventy-five every morning. In trying to understand the human condition- and I use that term loosely- it troubles me that so much suffering occurs in a world outside of mine. Attempting to locate empathy and understanding in such circumstances as a New Orleans or a deteriorating situation in Iraq is drastically inhibited by absence. One of my favorite writers, Robert Fulghum, a Unitarian Church minister who writes on things not necessarily pertaining to religion, once made note of the distance between those who suffer and those who watch. He writes, “Philosophical wisdom about death and destruction is always proportionate to your distance from the scene of the accident.”[1] Obviously one is limited in what can truly be learned from an event in which he did not partake. The further away I am from the scene of life, the less wisdom I can extract by philosophizing about it. But I try.

A phrase commonly referred to as “survivor’s guilt” has slowly worked its way into my lexicon. I read a brief excerpt from a report about online blogs in which soldiers in Iraq post their insights and experiences.[2] One soldier lamented of her constant reliving of the events that allowed her to survive, but a comrade to die, hence, my most recent exposure to the survivor’s guilt theorem. This may sound ostentatious, but I think I’ve been enduring a minor bout with such guilt. Because I don’t see these things but on the news, because they don’t occur in places where I reside, there is a lingering anxiety about my considerably comfortable lifestyle. No, I am not there. I am here, left with no company but my conscience, and all we ever talk about is why it was them and not me.

Every new virgin to the college graduate gang bang deems his plight as the most difficult; I am often of that coterie. Things are not easy, not by any means. I have had to deal with bouts of unemployment, financial insecurity, and aggravating, post matriculation periods of living with my parents. But those worries become rather trite when I critically read an article in the newspaper or pay close attention to the images on a TV with no cable, in a house that isn’t mine. At least I didn’t to have to move and I got to hold on to my lousy job. At least my parents have a house that is still standing on its foundation. The fact that I am able to routinely take a shit in a properly functioning, indoor toilet at any time of my choosing is evidence enough that I am living large. The folks in New Orleans- how about clogged, over flowing and nauseatingly grotesque Superdome restrooms, all of which were out of order in days?[3] The boys and girls in Iraq- military and civilian- how about having to dig a hole behind a blown up mosque? It is beginning to look like I don’t have much to complain about.

Not long after Hurricane Katrina dissipated, CNN’s Anderson Cooper made a disturbing comparison between us and them. “People are dying here,” Cooper stated as he surveyed the destroyed streets of New Orleans. “Walking amid the rubble, it feels like Sri Lanka, Sarajevo, somewhere else, not here, not home, not America.”[4] But I would go further and say that not even those images I see from my own land make me think I’m living in the same world as my fellow citizens. Surely all these cesspools of turmoil do not exist on this planet- Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and now New Orleans? Not here…not America? It is as though I am not part of that world, but I am. And the actualization that there are those living among us who can not evade disaster due to the perils of low income is disconcerting to me, if only because I feel guilty for openly living as I only know how.

The further compounding of this element of guilt can be attributed to the notion of helplessness. By watching what the news outlets give us, we can be regularly reminded of all that we can’t do to help those in more trying circumstances than ours. A quick review of the 1987 televised suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer, R. Budd Dwyer, lends credence to the helplessness felt by viewers, if only because those in attendance were equally as limited in what they could do to stop him.[5] The War on Terrorism’s front stage is Iraq and Americans are daily presented with images of suffering and pain and the voracious spread of local tyranny. Yet, all we are asked to do is to support the troops. How- by placing yellow ribbon magnets on the back of our SUVs? People want to help, they just don’t know how.

That is not to imply that the media is in the business purely for the ratings brought on by negative stories; there is usually some benign aspect that comes from solid, responsible reporting. For example, every news outlet and magazine and radio show is inundating the breathing public with requests for aid to help the Hurricane Katrina evacuees. There are celebrities and professional athletes, like NHL star Luc Robitaille and the NFL’s Manning brothers, who are out there on the front lines doing there part to aid the less fortunate victims. However, what lacks and thus derives the helplessness mentioned is the vocalizing of any ways average citizens can become active in the recovery process. For those who can’t afford to donate money, all they want is a chance to donate their time- to volunteer at shelters, to help rebuild, to drive the truck loads of donated goods, or anything else that can be done to help out our fellow brothers and sisters. Let’s face it, monetary donations are great, but for some, financial help doesn’t always remedy their intangible suffering.

The frustration felt is not weakened at all once the incessant complaining from unsatisfied middle classers begins. They are always quick to blame everyone but themselves for the predicament of low income families- sort of like a former Education Secretary under President Reagan and the first President Bush’s drug czar, Bill Bennett, and his assertion that aborting every black baby in the country would lower crime rates.[6] It seems as though they are reticent to comment on the fact that much of their daily routine depends on the labors of the lower class. Those Big Macs and four dollar cappuccinos don’t just appear. People like Fox News talk show guru, Bill O’Reilly, and his belligerent suggestion that had the poorer folks in Louisiana simply gotten educated and worked hard they wouldn’t be poor[7], does nothing to help the already unstable atmosphere consuming the country. Because so many of the people affected in this country by the hands of despair are often the poor and poverty stricken, maybe the American body politic would benefit from an attempt to comprehend the happenings that are going on in places far away from our everyday as middle classers. Then maybe our meager lives would look a little less so. A moment of empathy and understanding by those who think like the Bills might just elucidate that, although personal responsibility should not be negated in lower income neighborhoods, crime and poverty aren’t always the fault of those incapacitated by it. If the media is good for one thing, it is making the comfortable feel otherwise. Should the collective discomfort force the American public to have a discussion about the illogic of many of our policies, our ignorant viewpoints, and the rearranging of our national priorities, then I encourage every reporter to strip search the country.

So again, I find myself at the low end of a high, wondering why everything in the world that is supposedly going on is going on far away from me. Even events such as emergency airliner landings at LAX[8] and presidential pit stops in the city limits of San Diego are presented as good doses of surreality. I never see any of it. Is it possible that if I block it all out, everything that is not directly pertinent to my daily routine could be ignored, hmm? Even if that was possible, I would not want it to be. Recognizing the blessings that I have been handed is made easier when I watch the tumultuous events that happen all over the world in areas that too often have done nothing but been punished by the economic and cultural powers that be and are victimized by isolation.

In the end, though, little that plays out in the news has visible affects on the daily life I lead. Therefore, what is difficult to understand when I first learn of it becomes sufficiently harder to grasp because even its effects are beyond my periphery.

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[1] This quote comes from a journal entry on the author’s website. It may or may not be his own, but since it is not attributed to anyone else on his site, it will not be attributed to anyone else here. The original entry can be found at http://www.robertfulghum.com/journal.php?id=1

[2] Time, 26 September, 2005

[3] “Dome is hot and filthy- but welcome refuge”, AP, www.msnbc.com/id/9108975/

[4] Rolling Stone, Issue 984, 6 October 2005, p. 45

[5] Dwyer had been convicted of bribery and on Jan. 22, 1987, decided he’d rather dine on the barrel of a .357 than on some prison man-meat. He even had the audacity to suggest that the governor fill his (Dwyer's) soon-to-be vacant position with Dwyer’s wife. I guess no one can argue that Dwyer didn’t take his family into consideration.

[6] If you want more detail on these stupid comments, just Google the name Bill Bennett.

[7] Rolling Stone, Issue 984, 6 October 2005, p. 45

[8] A Jet Blue A320 passenger jet had taken off from Burbank, CA, when upon trying to retract its landing gears, the pilots were informed that there was some sort of malfunction. That malfunction was the front landing gear being locked at a 45 degree angle, totally sideways, from the direction in which it is supposed to face. The crew and passengers were instructed to circle Los Angeles International Airport for three hours in order to minimize the weight from any excess fuel that they had retained after the plane dumped out a majority of its over a stretch of land in L.A. The pilots then attempted an emergency landing. Sparks flew, smoke billowed, but the pilots were able to land the plane with minimal damage and no injuries. It was a truly remarkable event to witness on live TV.