Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

This past Saturday, The Globe and Mail ran a story on hapless, pathetic, alleged pedophile, Chris Neil; replete with effeminate sunglasses, a cartoon-like striped tee-shirt, a Vancouver Canucks cap and with his chicken chest and dangly spaghetti arms he appeared, long-faced and unshaven, on the front page.

Why? Why the front page?  There is nothing so insignificant as a pedophile, or an alleged pedophile. How bad can you be to be arrested in Bangkok for molesting children? The entire city of Bangkok was built as a sexual amusement part by diddlers, for diddlers.

Meantime, in the front section of The Chronicle Herald, there is a lovely Associated Press story of a man who was jailed for urinating on a disabled, dying woman; on the next page, in the “World” section, there is another AP story about a female nutcase from Missouri who killed a pregnant mother, cut the baby from the womb, and presented the baby to her friends as her child.

So what? How does that affect my life? Who cares other than the victims and their families?

Other annoying media predilections include mainstream television obsessing over the disappearance of white, young, blond girls. And, in the year 2001, prior to September 11, there was a departure — a departure from media mania over missing blond girls. Soon, we had married Congressman Gary Condit dominating the headlines due to the disappearance of his twenty-something paramour, Chandra Levy (you see, she was a brunette).

All of the Chandra Levy mania in the U.S. occurred during the very same summer where the “hard news” headlines here in Canada were dominated by the intricacies and character complexities of the reality TV show Survivor (I wish I was kidding).

The granddaddy of bullshit stories is, of course, 1995’s O.J. Simpson trial. I have tried to reconcile the bizarre societal focus of it all by trying to understand the social/cultural undercurrents of the event of which the O.J. Simpson trial itself became a kind of metaphorical shorthand –  shorthand for police prejudice, racial tension, Hollywood dysfunction, trophy wives, obsessive control, mixed marriages, the LA police department as a whole, drug use and wealthy, lost people.

Politically, the most egregious example of titillation as news, and as political content, was the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It was a very tight election between Gore and Bush – one that was so close the Supreme Court called it. Erase that scandal and Al Gore wins his home state of Tennessee, the moral majority doesn’t back flip, Clinton (the best campaigner in two generations) gets to campaign with Al Gore, and, in all likelihood, Gore handily defeats Bush.

Can you imagine if there was a world without George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, whom he empowered? A Gore Presidency would have ensured that political exile.

Counter-factual history (the study of “what ifs”), would have meant that, under Gore, there would be more focus on environmental laws, no Iraq invasion; a proper prosecution of the Afghanistan war without the reconsolidation of the Taliban that occurred as a result of the very distraction of the Iraq invasion; a strategically stronger Israel; a weaker Iran – oh, and no upcoming war with Iran either (mark my words on that one).

For all of this, crazily, you can blame the oral sex applied by Monica Lewinsky — despite the fact that Hillary has forgiven him and they have both moved on (it is their marriage after all).

When it comes to news cycles and analysis, the impending war with Iran (from the folks who brought you Iraq), and the near future inevitability of nuclear weapons application, rarely passes by our radar. Instead, we wish for the pratfalls of others, the blood in someone else’s eye; a focus dominated by life’s losers, the inane and insane murderers, the grotesqueries that appear in Circus side-shows known as news with the bearded lady and the dwarf.

I have come to the conclusion that we are not better than the titillating and the trivial. It is what shapes us; what we talk about; what consumes us; it is what we know and what we want.

And what we are.