All Apologies

There’s been a painful lack of "content" -- what we used to call writing back in the old days -- here of late. In part this is because we’re involved with the entry of a lot of data at our new day job, the endless cutting and pasting from browser to spreadsheet that makes the words Incipient Repetitive Stress Disorder loom large in our imagination. It’s the sort of thing that makes one less inclined to come home of an evening and rattle off a few hundred words on the events of the day. (And it should, we hasten to add, be temporary.)

But it's mostly the welter of unprocessable events that make us shy away from our webloggerly calling; the news is just so Uniformly Dreadful that we don’t know how to be sardonically expository in response to it, despite our desire to soothe you with Wombat Soup for the Soul. We’ll admit it: we fail to grasp what we could add to the international conversation about the shredding of hope for peace in the Middle East – the infinite regress of “context” on that one is enough to make our head (OK, my head, but I don’t feel like dropping out of the editorial we just this minute; it’s comfy, like an old sweater) spin right clean off our neck. Who’s less wrong – the vengeful suicide bombers or the Rush ‘em & Crush ‘em Sharon government? Thanks, but we know when we’re conceptually licked. And it doesn’t incidentally make us feel any better to have the flattening of Jenin bring back to mind the uncounted dead our Infinitely Just nation recently liberated via high explosive a few thousand miles down the Silk Road.

And we don’t even really know how many miles it is, or if the Silk Road could be reasonably said to connect, say, Haifa and Jellalabad. This is what we’re talking about: composing a worthwhile post on damned near anything that’s going on these days would require more googling than you’d get in a daycare center full of the newly verbal.

To say nothing of medieval conclaves in Rome gathering to fine-tune their institutional denial. To say nothing of the Republican party getting poised to snatch it’s narrow margin in the Senate back. To say nothing of the vanishing of due process (read, please do read, the cover story in this month’s Harper's), the obscene energy policy maneuvers currently passing for "debate", the rise of Le Pen, and the disappearance of News Radio reruns from A&E.

Granted, nobody we know comes to the WF for a well-researched emendation of the fluff what does pass in these days for journalism. (And we’re grateful, because we'd fail quickly and dramatically and no one would ever return to this our cherished Mumbling Pit.) Maybe this is simply a delayed version of the feeling that swept over so many people six months ago: nothing feels so appropriate, many of these days, as silence.

Posted by BT at April 25, 2002 07:01 PM