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medieval news
Wednesday, May 30 2001
I listen to a lot of news shows during my workday, simply because that's mostly what KCRW plays. Sure, there's Nic Harcourt's Morning Becomes Eclectic music show, which exposes me to the latest wave of British/French invasion, but other than that KCRW is usually one sound bite followed by another, with some Arianna Huffington thrown in for good measure. Today for some reason the news was an especially egregious hybrid of the disturbing and the infuriating. It seemed to be preoccupied with the fact that a couple hapless African embassy bombers, having already been found guilty, are entering into the "penalty phase" of their trials. In flagrant disregard for jurisdictional credibility, these guys are being tried not in Africa, but in New York City. To hear the word "penalty phase" conjures up images of some sort of athletic event, but what's actually being decided here is whether or not to impose the death penalty. Should our tax dollars pay to strap these evil Arabs down to gurneys to have poisons injected into their veins?
Another item in the news concerns Timothy McVeigh and whether or not the FBI fuckup is such that he will avoid being executed on his appointed day. To me it is anachronistically surreal to have the airwaves filled with so many discussions of when and if various people will be killed by a government. But the only way to make this stuff truly interesting would be to have the method of execution be public drawing and quartering. In such a fully-realized retro-medieval world I can easily imagine the sober banter among pundits as they discuss how long the executions are expected to take and what people with front row tickets can expect to see, hear, and take home for a souvenir. "Hey honey, I got an ear!"
The thing that gets me is the sheer amount of wasted airtime being spent on these people. The introduction of legally-sanctioned murder into the equation brings excessive media focus. Surely there's more important stuff out there that's truly newsworthy, but here we are getting all worked up because we, America, land of the free & home of the brave, get to kill some crazy Arab with an unpronounceable name. It's medieval and it's creepy.
The only other major issue in the news today is George W. Bush running around from one National Park to another wearing his best environmentalismist hat. And what exactly does he have to offer our parks and scenic areas? Let's see now, he wants to fix the roads, fill the pot holes, mow the lawns, and slap a fresh coat of paint on the buildings. None of these initiatives is about the environment at all; it's all about pleasing the ugly Americans who want to watch cable teevee when they go to Yosemite.
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