Before the towers fell

It’s easy to put one person in the box. In fact that’s what the box does best. The current television media fixation with Terri Schiavo, the Pope, and Michael Jackson illustrates what a small screen the small screen is. Tens of thousands dead, tens of thousands living in oppression, rebellion, revolution rendered so many landscapes, backdrops different only in their state of flux, their pictures too big to encompass, their expanse too vast to contemplate.

It’s easier to focus on individuals. But as the camera draws in, in, in, the individual looms, and all matters become matters of self. The unrequited intimacy of celebrity coverage so closely mimics the actual intimacy of the mirror as to become indistinguishable. As television becomes our most flattering looking-glass we become most concerned with our own condition rather than that of our fellow man or all, in a word selfish.

Perhaps it has always been thus, but as the current narcissistic self-referential media maelstrom whips up, doing its damnedest to hide the many behind the one, I am more reminded of life before September 11, 2001 than of anything else. Are there more shoes to drop? Does pride goeth before a fall? I worry.