Fifty years ago, for my first job after college, I worked as a script writer and producer for an all-news radio station in Glendale, Arizona. It had all the appeal of a sweat shop in a right to work state, writing and pulling together a six-minute newscast of local and area news and a minute of headlines every 30 minutes. With high-speed writing, phone calls, interviews, recording and editing I had something I could give to a Ted Baxter-like announcer who naturally thought he could do it better.If learning to write means learning not to think I had found the right spot. As well, I learned that as necessity is also the mother of no invention, every news story fell into one of three or four categories. I didn’t have to write a new traffic fatality story every time; I simply had to fill in the blanks:name, location, time, police department, and hospital. Passive voice was also handy for revealing things without attribution. I could do it, but I wondered why.
For one five-minute piece for Michiana Chronicles every two months there is no formula. Maybe there’s a pattern, an idea or a memory typically attaching to a reason to believe, but I have to start from scratch every time. Sometimes an idea occurs to me more easily than others, like a gift from a guardian angel. “Thank you,” I say.
That’s not the case this time. The fact is that this time I don’t know what to say. Right now, I’m feeling unmoored, confused and cut off from the reason to believe, like I’m trapped inside of a snow globe that’s been glued to one of those machines that shakes up cans of paint at the hardware store. The flakes never get a chance to settle. It’s hard to convey some sanity in the world this way. The truth in the world as I knew it has vanished. What am I supposed to say about that?
We all have a narrative framework for making sense of the world. In mine, a pluralistic American society means dialogue and compromise which simply means recognizing that nobody gets everything they want, but that we’ll move, too slowly but surely, in the direction of social justice, because the instincts that draw us in that direction are universal. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice:” that thing.With education as the moderating path toward greater understanding, I believed that superstition and tribalism would fade and that someday the brotherhood and the sisterhood would come to recognize that the borders that separate us are detrimental to our health. That seems a bit foolish to me now. Naive.
That’s what I want to believe but I know that I want to believe and what’s true have always been different things. The problem for me now is that “what’s true” seems to no longer exists. Now that “what’s true” has been dumbed down to “that’s your opinion,” and with no objective common ground, I’m left with only the immoderate, “what I want to believe.”
There’s no logic anymore: no premise, no supporting evidence, and no reasoned conclusion. The conclusion is what we start with; what I want to believe opposed to what you want to believe supported with other conclusions pretending to be supporting evidence that are really other things that you want to believe opposed to conclusions that are other things that I want to believe. To “prove” something is to yell what you want to believe more loudly that the person who wants to believe what they want to believe. That kind of thinking, older than the hills, is now all we have. It’s the end of the Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th-century European intellectual movement that emphasized reason and science to challenge tradition and superstition, the kind of thinking that went into the origins of the United States of America. The Enlightenment, one of those awful things kids learn about at college.Did I mention that I am now a snow globe glued to one of those machines that shakes up the cans of paint …? I really don’t know what to say.
The tyranny of the deadline forces the writers and readers who report and pontificate to fall back on an acceptable narrative with an established scene and an established set of characters. I wonder if a presupposed narrative framework for making sense of the world makes us comfortable when we should not be. What role do I play with another Michiana Chronicle in maintaining the comforting tropes of the familiar? The dance band on the Titanic: that thing.
I am finding it difficult to fall back on my tried-and-true narrative in the course of understanding contemporary events.
My moderation now seems misguided.
Maybe, after I’m long gone and this era of the irrational is over, someone will be able to look back and think that being shaken out of their habits of thought was a good thing. Maybe after the flakes settle we’ll come out of this mess with a better understanding of who we are and what we need to do. Maybe. Maybe someday.
Music: "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" by Radiohead
