For a news junkie, I picked one heck of a week to go away. Trump got acquitted. The coronavirus, since named COVID-19, continued to spread. The Iowa caucuses imploded, with no clear winner emerging from the dust and debris. If I were one of the leading candidates I’d be upset, too. So much for the importance of a good ground game.
My family, with whom I was traveling, assured me it was for the best. Not Trump’s acquittal or the Chinese and Democrats bungling their respective crises. But my involuntary news blackout.
The place we were renting in the British Virgin Islands didn’t have a TV and the Wi-Fi was lethargic at best. I could have followed the news on my phone. But I tended to agree with my family that my health, both mental and physical, probably wouldn’t suffer and might even benefit from not knowing whatever random thoughts and slurs the 45th President of the United States was spewing at any particular moment.
I won’t suggest I was totally out of the loop. And neither were they. I’m not sure checking Instagram several times a day, as my daughters did, is any more evolved than sneaking a peak at the headlines or, come evening, watching the PBS Newshour, delayed an hour, on YouTube.
Speaking of The Newshour I’d like to note the passing of retired anchor Jim Lehrer, a paragon of calm deliberation across the decades. The show is an anachronism, one of the few left that doesn’t contribute to the deafening cacophony drowning out reason (I realize I’m mixing and mangling metaphors here but so what) and perspective in our current media maelstrom.
If anything, The Newshour has served as a port in the storm for most of my adult life and still does. If you haven’t watched lately, with Judy Woodruff now moderating, I suggest you do.
On any given night you’ll learn a lot more, on subjects that often stray far afield of politics, than you will in that time slot on MSNBC, CNN and, obviously, Fox.
We’ve been lucky enough to travel to the Caribbean on and off around this time of year for decades. One of my rituals used to be enjoying The Newshour accompanied by a cocktail while watching the sun set below the sea. The distance from your real life felt all the greater because you were catching up on the day’s inhumanity from a safe distance. I don’t want to sound smug or heartless but observing the world from that remove made your vacation feel super-charged.
Unfortunately, when TV signals went digital so went my tiny Sony Watchman. And if it’s possible to watch American TV live abroad without signing your life away I haven’t yet figured out how.
The news deprivation, and its alternative – swimming, snorkeling, reading books, and cooking meals together – offered an interesting perspective on life in the cauldron, or perhaps spinning centrifuge is a better analogy, of the media maw and its dark and menacing manifestations.
It didn’t exactly come as a revelation, but what you discover is that if you cut your Chris Wallace and Chris Cuomo, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper calories by half to three-quarters, or even 91%, you probably won’t be any less well-informed than if you check your devices every fifteen minutes.
The reason being that, for those of us who follow politics religiously, the exercise has turned into something of a chain reaction car, train and plane wreck, tractor trailers jackknifed all over the place in a blizzard, from which it’s almost impossible to turn away. With Donald Trump behind the wheel in the pace car, of course.
I know, I’m mixing my metaphors again.
Our vacation wasn’t the only recent event that offered me the 30,000-foot perspective on the current situation. Even more profound was sorting through my mother’s and father’s correspondence dating back to the 1950’s and ending a year ago. They as well as many of the people who wrote to them are gone.
The concerns, gossip and news captured in their mail – the weather; aches and pains; travel plans; people’s triumphs and failures; booms and bankruptcies; births, marriages, divorces and deaths; elections, assassinations, impeachments – now feel like ancient history. Seemingly no less ephemeral than the waves lapping the shore of the beach we visited every morning to go swimming before breakfast.
As for the news, it isn’t going anywhere. When we returned Sunday night coronavirus infections continued to rage, the President to tweet and gin up scandals afresh, the candidates hoping to replace him spinning their muddied Iowa finishes into victories.
The Oscars quickly vanished into the meat grinder of, so to speak, hard news, and the soon-to-be-known New Hampshire primary results promised to be clarifying only to the extent that it pushed the narrative into the next week and the exhausting one after that.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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