Listening To The News

Baysage has asked me whether I have actually stopped listening to the news. I would have to say, yes, I did do so...pretty much. I think I have good reasons.

1) I do read the news: BBC, Bloomberg, a little HuffPo if I want a blast of adrenalin, and NY Times, WaPo, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, as well as Mother Jones, and about 4 alternative news sites.

I consider TV news to be rude, loud, and intrusive. I really dislike arrogant, in-your-face news that doesn't have much to say. I remember it from 2002 -03 and the run up to the Iraq War. In-yer-face with lies and self-deception! One really gets the impression that "The News" is but an ongoing coda to the Eternal Tale Told by an Idiot...full of this, replete with that, and signifying that good taste be given the "bum's rush".

It forms the news more than reporting it. I glimpsed at the news the other day and saw Sarah Palin had Twittered ( a good description of her speech ) that it's time to "reload".

Good Lord! Hasn't that governership-quitting fool ever heard of Neoptolemus?

Neoptolemus was killed by the Lacedemonians - upon on altar - in the exact manner he had killed another.

When these people call for violence, they are calling violence upon the heads of all: themselves, their children, and their grandchildren, as well as their putative "enemies". Why in the name of heaven would I want to hear such news, without the wise and sage observation that public figures ought not drink of the wine of violence? I do not. I furthermore do not wish to hear anything such a misshapen political figure has to say about anything.

And this is what happens when someone in your household has to "watch" the news: you get this royal dose of fecality from the Media Favorites and/ or Celebrities dumped into your life!

Media News is no more than 50% information. The rest is entertainment to relax, to work you up, to outrage you, to arouse....

For all I care, one may as well have Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown on doing the news. Or Flavor Fav doing a reality show on his staircase.

2) My local news is usually an insult to intelligence.

The word "working" or - more correctly - "workin'  "  has taken over. It is a word of many uses, a Protean word. Not like "on tap" which was adopted years ago to mean "next" or "coming up" or "to be followed by"; when we cutely cut to commercial, some wondrous story would be promised to be "on tap".

But workin'  - there's a word that can do so many things, it banishes carefully constructed sentences.

I first heard the word workin' some years ago, when a member of the waitstaff at some eatery sauntered up to the table. It was late-ish in the meal, so I knew I was not to be interrogated as to whether the chow was good or not. We had already affirmed the goodness of the chow at an earlier date. So what was this bit of conviviality?

I was asked whether I was " still workin' on it? "

Now this was at least 10 years or more ago, and "workin' on it" had not yet come to be standard in the glossaries of restaurants. It conjured unpleasant images in my mind of a dog " worrying " a bone around and around his doggie dish...something like Spike, the big,  plug-ugly bull dog in the Tom & Jerry cartoons: big Spike pushing a bone around his bowl with his nose, trying to get the last shred of meat from it. Perhaps the question meant "Shall we bring along the bone-breakers to allow you to suck the marrow out? ( seeing that you are eating like an unrestrained carnivore!)"

Well, I was speechless. I thought I was again in one of those places I've written about, where the waitstaff mocks the customers as a gesture of brotherhood and friendship. I mean, I was in no way sitting there staring off into space, nor silently meditating upon my meal. I was actively engaged in eating - as I recall. And being actively engaged in eating, it is very disconcerting to have some busybody 20 years your junior come up and ask if that display you're putting on means you are still eating!!!

Then WORKIN' was discovered by the local news people. They no doubt heard it in their local eateries, and thought it was a smashing word. Originally, accidents occurred on the roadways, and "they" were working to get them clear, where "they" is assumed to be known to refer to the roadway authorities in charge of such matters.

Now, however, accidents themselves are WORKIN' ! If an accident has occurred, it is no longer potential; i.e., "on tap", but it is actually workin' ! And this apparently means (a) an accident has occurred, (b) the problems caused by the accident are yet ongoing, and (c) the authorities are trying to clean things up.

And it applies to more than mere expressway accidents now. It applies to everything. Musical events have been heard to be workin' :  it happened, it is continuing, and it rocks! The Weatherman has adopted workin' , and now snowstorms are no longer merely imminent and dumping snow on us up to our eyeballs, but the storms are workin': they are on the way, they are on the Doppler radar, they are dumping snow on us, and they probably will continue to do so for a few hours. All the while, the salt crews will be a-workin' to clean up after the hard-workin' snowstorm.

You take this inane speech and combine it with that idiotic grin they have plastered on their faces, and it is a blow-up workin'.

I think I shall try something like "belax", in the sense of  " accidents on the expressway are belaxing today ", which will mean that there are no accidents, the lack of accidents is ongoing, and the authorities are not busy trying to ameliorate the situation.