#515 Everything We Know About the Bomber- Rebecca Makkai
Once again, I really want to urge people to read this collection,
Music for Wartime. This is a string of paragraphs of the bits of stuff we learn
from the barrage of TV news coverage during a bombing—it’s disaster porn. The
needless facts about a bombers life, the endless ephemera that gest thrown at
us keep our attention.
This isn’t exactly a new idea, but Makkai does it perfectly,
shapes a reality of reality television that shouldn’t look like a fun house
mirror but does anyway. Any coverage of a horrible attack or a bombing or a
shooting somehow devolves quickly into a lesson on how NOT to cover the news.
There is no way we need to know about a third grade report card of an alleged
mass murderer…but there it is BREAKING NEWS: KILLER FAILED ART CLASS AS A KID!
What’s worse is that “News” stations are willing to get it
wrong, and then correct later. They report a rumor about a person that ends up being
false (and sometimes ends with death threats of an innocent person) and don’t
think it’s morally reprehensible because they weren’t trying to report facts,
they were merely relaying quotes from involved persons near the scene.
Important topic, great social commentary here. In a
collection filled with war stories from past generations, the juxtaposition of
something this current is powerful.
Notable Passage: “We plan to learn more. We plan to keep
updated. We plan to look for patterns…we will repeat these facts till they
sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound lie fate.”
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