Once in a Lifetime

I don't know about you, but I've had it up to here with once-in-a-lifetime events.

Katrina was once in a lifetime. The 2004 tsunami was once in a lifetime. This past year's wildfires were the worst blazes in living memory. Every other month seems to bring an epic rain or snow that is said to be the storm of the century. And don't get me started on the polar ice cap.

George W. Bush, the worst president in American history, will turn out to be, God willing, once in a lifetime, as will the officially sanctioned use of torture by American interrogators, the subjugation of the Justice Department by a bunch of right-wing twenty-something hacks, and the grotesque intervention of Congress into the Terry Schaivo case. If Dick Cheney isn't once in a lifetime, there is reason to doubt the existence of divine mercy.

The depth of the unfolding recession, for those who did not experience the Great Depression, is now forecast to be once in a lifetime. Bernie Madoff's breathtaking Ponzi scheme is - one can only hope - once in a lifetime. The demise of Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, is once in a lifetime, as will be the extinction of Levitz, the 97-year-old furniture chain, and (as is plausible) of Dodge (b. 1914) and Kmart (b. 1962).

Until this recession, India and China were poised to overtake the U.S. economy, which would surely constitute a once-in-a-lifetime development, like the fall of communism, tobacco, butter, girdles and Esperanto.

The impending deaths of the print newspaper, the network evening news and the television networks themselves - like the prior deaths of the buggy, vaudeville and silent movies - are bound to be experienced as once in a lifetime. The demises of slide rules, typewriters, Polaroid instant cameras and VHS tapes each marked the end of an era. TV Guide is going the route of Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Look and Life; when either Time or Newsweek folds, its surviving competitor will doubtless send it off with a once-in-a-lifetime obit.

September 11th was once in a lifetime, unless you lived through Pearl Harbor. It is wishful thinking to imagine that the malicious explosion of a nuclear device is not in the world's foreseeable future, and if, kinahora, that happens, it will surely be labeled - optimistically - once in a lifetime.

On the upside, the election of a black American president is totally without precedent, and it is not inconceivable that a woman will eventually follow him to the White House, though if it's Sarah Palin, she stands a decent chance of wresting worst-ever laurels from Bush.

My discomfort at being crowded by this surfeit of once-in-a-lifetime happenings is partly about hype, and mostly about mental hygiene.

The mainstream news media have no vested interest in proportionality. With so many things competing for our attention, the only way for media-owning corporations to capture our eyeballs is to inflate everything to Armageddon dimensions. Every lurid local crime becomes a national melodrama; every flare-up on the planet is depicted as a precursor to World War III; every scandal is Watergate, or something else-gate. We are inundated with the Ten Worst This, and Ten Best That, while long-simmering atrocities truly deserving of notice, like Darfur or the tuberculosis pandemic, barely make it onto the radar screen.

No wonder the world has the jitters. We are daily assaulted by so much hyperbole that it is nearly impossible to know what is important any more. It is undeniable that we live in a time of big change, but if we did not also live in a time of big media, I am not convinced that we would experience our lives as a relentless onslaught of cliffhangers, crises and catastrophes.

To every thing, Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a season, but you wouldn't know it from the media, which know only one season, which is BREAKING NEWS. Real life has natural rhythms; it plays out on many stages, from the personal and private to the public and historical. But the culture of THIS JUST IN homogenizes those differences. Its imperative is to monetize our attention, and the easiest way to do that is to see as much as possible through once-in-a-lifetime lenses.

I don't mean to diminish the pain of the economic meltdown, or the significance of climate change, or the symbolic breakthrough of the Obama inauguration, or the dizzying transformations being wrought by technology. But it does no good for us as citizens if everything is as screamingly urgent as everything else, and it does no good for us as people if our nervous systems are constantly being bombarded by superlatives. How can our leaders set priorities, how will we ever agree on trade-offs, if public discourse only consists of capital letters? How can we linger in the intimacies and mysteries of existence, how will we truly know what's worth caring about, if shock and rupture is the only language our culture knows how to speak?

This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.

Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan

Comments

[DACC]

Marty; upon review of this brutally honest article you just acquired a new fan. Very well done!!

[davidly]

Well said, Marty! By the way, according to HuffPo's homepage, you would be one of the breaking opinions on the Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post.

[magen]

Why do you pay attention to the extinct dinosaur, completely out of touch, and riddled with ulterior motives MSM???????

TV news, cable news, and print news have as much credibility as the gossip rags that you see on line at the grocery store.

Every once in a while I watch or read one of these news outlets-it's like comedy for me.

[ObjectiveRealist]

[
TV news, cable news, and print news have as much credibility as the gossip rags that you see on line at the grocery store.
]

Less; those at least are peer-reviewed. Imagine that the color of Elle's bikini was reported incorrectly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/29/elle-macphersons-beach-y_n_153935.html
"Competitors" would correct *that* error, but not Cheney's lie that "we know" that Muhammad Atta met with any Iraqi personnel, in Prague or anywhere else, because annoying Elle MacPherson only costs you a few percentage points in likelihood of a future interview with her. Cheney illegally tortures and wiretaps people for fun.

[RButler]

Thank you. Thank you for making this point so well. It's like taking a yellow highlighter and highlighting every single word in a book.

The media does the 'once in a lifetime' cr*p while they miss so many stories until they've already happened. (see the current meltdown)

Another silly media tool lately is making local stories into national or international news when there are more important things to report.

[ObjectiveRealist]

[
The media does the 'once in a lifetime' cr*p while they miss so many stories until they've already happened.
]

Most of their customers don't offer any kind of incentive pay for routinely providing useful information before it has resulted in something catastrophic. Most aren't educated enough to do anything with such information if it is offered to them, anyway. Otherwise, more Americans would read The Economist and Nature than People and The Inquirer.

[pm247]

TV news doesn't have to be trite, artificial and pretentious. The Spanish networks, for instance, offer informative and interesting news shows. They are fast-moving but thorough; evocative but not condescending.

More type, less hype.

[Bongborg]

They just sound fast-moving because of all the rapidfire Spanish. A snappy name like Telemundo doesn't hurt either.

[wagthedog1001]

It's the news media: "Extra! Extra! Read All About It!" Today's Armageddon is ...

Thanks for the post and here's hoping most mature adults including our leaders are beyond "chasing the sparklies" every day and have a deeper world view.

[pfc1369]

"It is wishful thinking to imagine that the malicious explosion of a nuclear device is not in the world's foreseeable future, and if, kinahora, that happens, it will surely be labeled - optimistically - once in a lifetime."

Marty, "kinahora" is used to ward off evil, after you have spoken of GOOD FORTUNE. Similar to "knock on wood."
You seem to be employing it to mean "God forbid."

[Mnemanth]

As long as the populace is paralyzed with fear, our "leaders" can do whatever they wish with impunity. As long as the people are innundated with this hype about every little ugliness under the sun, they'll be blind to any beauty, any measure of hope. They'll remain pessimistic and passive.
As long as we all continue to buy into it, as long as we all eat it up and ask for more, we deserve it. Until the day arrives where we stand up and demand something else, until we push away from the plate of misery we're gorging ourselves on, we may as well just keep asking for another steaming helping.

[Edzero]

Marty:

Great post, as usual.

A lengthy mandated moratorium from main stream news media
channels,both visual and auditory, would probably enhance the
mental health of the nation.

Perhaps the blog creators and responders should take a
vacation as well.

Maybe we all need to work at achieving a Buddhist
calm and quiet mind. This state of consciousness is
quite a miracle. It really puts events in perspective.

[Mnemanth]

I like it!

[DACC]

ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[Vajara]

Very good post, Marty. You raise some good questions, especially about how to set priorities when everything on our planet, our country, our town, our home and in our mind is so urgent to resolve. Actually, every thought seems to take precedence over the last one. Every apparent solution to one problem only raises more questions and reactions. Perhaps it is time for humanity to awaken to the fact that if we don't calm our minds and our thoughts, we are destined for serious mental health issues or problems. It looks like we have the best mind for the job as president, but what about the others. How well do they take care of themselves so that their decision making is focused? I appreciate your thoughtful questions that you raise.

My resolution for the New Year is to practice calming my mind so that I can be a resourceful human being during this crazy and perhaps dangerous period in our history.

[BobHiggins]

Breaking news, Holy crap, WTF

There's an Esperanto Wiki? Esperanto lives?

I'm awaiting details at ten.

[BrianBarker]

The fall of Esperanto?

During a short period of 121 years Esperanto is in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, include George Soros, Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet, Ulrich Brandenberg, the new German Ambassador to NATO, and World Champion Chess Player, Susan Polger

Further arguments can be seen at - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU and a glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

[flatus]

Why do we bother to learn a second langauge when sign language is available? Would it not be possible to talk to anyone in the world if we all knew how to "sign"?

[LeftRight]

Rather than once in a lifetime, I would like to see George W. Bush be once in EVER!!

[DownerCow]

It's already been twice in my lifetime. I still think Nixon will 'outshine' Bush as the worst president in history. Look how many more were killed in Nam, how bad the economy was in the 70's, and the polarization of America - remember Hard-hats vs. Long-hairs?

[LeftRight]

First, the only reason that more were killed in Nam than will be killed in Iraq is because we have better field medical care now. This will result in a FAR larger number of those coming back with serious disabilities which would have killed them in Nam.

Second, give the economy time, it's just starting to collapse!

And third, if you think that the hard hats vs long hairs was bad, you obviously haven't been watching the conservatives vs the progressives!

The fact of the matter is that as bad as Nixon was, he's been out-shone by bush. Some of that is due to the groundwork that Nixon laid, but most of it is just his own work!