The nightly snooze...

Used to be, around six or so, my parents would fix themselves big stiff drinks and settle in front of our unreliable TV set for the fuzzy black and white news. This was a ritual set in stone. Generally there were two newscasters, serious grown-ups both. They each held a sheaf of papers and for half an hour they would trade off back and forth, giving the news and introducing the news clips if there were any. Back then, watching the news stacked up as one of those bewildering and dull grown-up activities, like reading books with no pictures or hitting a bucket of golf balls.

My sister and I knew enough to make ourselves scarce. This was a chunk of sacred Adult Time, not to be screwed with by a couple of whiny kids. It was also paralyzingly dull and incomprehensible. I couldn't imagine when I'd ever watch the news. When I thought about grown-up life at all, it was in sharply divided terms. On one side, I saw myself wearing a tight black sheath, pearls, and high black stilettos. But mostly I pictured myself at a desk, writing. And I didn't know what I'd wear for that.

Then, when I married mistakenly and too young, it was during the Vietnam war and I was riveted to the nightly news. I always wondered what flagrant lies our gray-faced president LBJ would tell, or what outright falsities the generals would try out. Their whoppers were always unmasked by the war footage that followed. Even today, I don't know how we saw what we saw, but somehow we saw everything: napalmed villagers, firestorms, carpet-bombing, our troops blasted and wounded, the exhausted and angry war correspondents. Odd as it seems now, back then, while living in a country that was hostile to someone like me, I trusted the evening news, part of it at least.

Today, you'd be nuts to put your faith in the crap that's on TV. Yesterday, while we sat outside at a Starbucks, my friend remarked, "I just don't keep up with the news. And I'm a lot happier." I believed her and I also understood what she meant. I do keep up with the news, and it's a day's work. I'm not any happier for it, but it seems important to keep my ear to the ground. No doubt it's my DC upbringing coupled with an apocalyptic outlook acquired during the last eight years.

During year one of the Current Occupant, I had a crawlie sense of unease, and tried to read my city newspaper to get a grip on was happening. It was then I discovered I'd happened upon My Weekly Reader in all its childish glory. And so, once again I went adventuring in the blogosphere. But like my own blog, the political blogs were highly subjective. Even those that ripped news articles off factual sources, only printed select portions. For a while I volunteered for an anti-Current Occupant blog, covering the news from Pakistan, just to figure out how blogs worked.

Today, my sense of the news is that there's been an explosion in a pillow factory. Information (in the IT sense of the word...that is, stuff) abounds, some of it okay, some of it crazy, not all that much in between. It's taken me years of surfing in uncharted waters to paste together my own version of the evening news. But perhaps my parents did the same thing, using 1950's resources. They weren't much for being dictated to by culturally-anointed grown-ups. That's why we took a minimum of three daily newspapers and a flood of magazines. It's probably also why they were so solemn during the evening snooze, watching reports of the McCarthy hearings, Batista's overthrow, A and H bomb tests, U-2 spy planes, or missiles in Cuba.

My mom and dad knew the news wasn't fit for kids.
And they were dead right.