Special and Ordinary

It takes 13-14 hours to drive from St. Louis to Austin. Excluding the first 6 when I discovered I'd downloaded the wrong software, I have spent a total of 20 hours listening to Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown, narrated by him, truly.

I'm not even done yet. I'm on chapter 26 of chapter-god-knows-how-many. As of chapter 26, he's only just begun to describe W. Bush's presidency.

I will discuss this in full at a later date. The biggest benefit of “reading” this memoir is to compare Rummy's account with what I already knew from the media. I always “knew” the media distorted events to create a swallowable story that could be consumed in 2-3 minutes, but in my laziness, I push this aside as I take my daily headline stroll across various news sites.

Let me clarify: By “distort,” I do not mean “falsify.” I mean “leave out details that don't contribute to the main impression the writer is trying to convey.” I don't agree with Rumsfeld's perception of certain key events, but it is nice to be reminded that backstory and details are always kept out of national reports in order to create pretty news bites and entertaining caricatures.

As consumers of media, we have shown organizations like the AP, Yahoo! News, and CNN that we prefer summaries to explanations. Have you seen articles that are broken up into two pages? (That's not because they ran out of room.) How often do you click on page two? Web sites track clicking habits and modify their content to accommodate such. Given the presence of two-page articles, I would assume that most people DON'T click to the next page. Half of an article is enough for them (and if they're like me, they skimmed that half).

Blame what you want on Twitter and text messages and technology that warps our ability to think deeply. My concern is with people's understanding of their government, as presented by mainstream media on an hourly basis. News is a narrative. It's an event wrapped up in a story, crafted for easy consumption. Any time a news article references a character that has been written about before, it tries to reference that character's reputation. Take Sarah Palin. She has been quoted many times lamenting media objectivity. This is worth lamenting. Forget the caricature that has been created in lieu of Palin's humanity (whether she brought it on herself or not); forget her lack of grace during interviews; forget her poor thinking habits. The media is not objective. It references knowledge that was distorted from the beginning. The news is not interested in objectivity: It's interested in gaining viewership and mouse clicks.

The news isn't "liberal" or "conservative." It's a machine that shows violent car crashes because people like to look and quotes Jon Stewart because people like to laugh. It talks about Michelle Obama's dresses. It talks about celebrities' life events as though it's news.

But this is not a reason to feel helpless! (It's hard not to feel helpless.) It takes effort to be wholly informed, and it involves sifting through less-popular, less-sexy news sites like BuzzFlash (along with other news sites that don't wear its progressiveness on its sleeve). What I like about BuzzFlash are the links at the bottom to countless other news sites—go ahead, scroll all the way down. Always hold corporate-backed news sources at arm's length, ESPECIALLY when it comes to politics, and ORDINARILY with every topic.

I want to know what's going on in the world because what goes on does affect me...eventually.