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Glenn Reynolds wonders at the lack of attention that North Korean famine gets, and asks, "Do people just not care?" Kathy Kinsley notes a poll that the attention of U.S. citizens to foreign news has not increased significantly since 11 September last, and rather discouragedly says, "Seems to me there's a large groups out there still saying, 'I don't know, and I don't want to know.'" Yes and of course. The ideal of a republic whose citizens were filled with Machiavellian virtù, which by definition includes paying attention to the news that could affect them and that republic, and knowing enough to decide which news items fell in that category, never really existed. The past history of the U.S., however, provided a closer approximation to it. Somewhen in that history (people will argue for times and causes between the Civil War and the post-Watergate political "reforms"), after a steady drumroll of, "Leave things to Us, the people on a much higher plane, and everything will be just fine", we began to believe it. And of course, if we aren't offering arguments that influence those high debates, why should we pay attention to news that might inform those arguments? Reading, hearing, or seeing that news, and thinking about it, just takes up valuable time that could be spent blogging. Even those who cry for "the people" to be more concerned about politics (save for those confused souls who thought that Nixon was being sincere about "the silent majority) are saying, "Vote for us at every election, and otherwise don't worry your pretty little heads about affairs; we'll take care of things". It's a truism that all politics (even non-electoral ones) are local. The corollary, of course, is that what isn't local doesn't penetrate into the political world, save perhaps at that rarified height at which the government hires a Permanent Undersecretary of Boring Stuff to pay attention to those things that we can't be bothered with. A newspaper editor once wrote that a dogfight downtown was of more interest to people than a famine in China. This, of course, both because the dogfight is more likely to affect them ("What, I can't get in to Filene's?"), and they are less likely to affect the famine, or even the debate on it. The irony is, of course, that in the wake of the Islamofascist attacks last September, Bush solemnly told us that we should go back to business as usual...which of course included ignoring news. A more principled and energetic statement would have been, "Don't go back to business as usual; stay involved and concerned; there's a freaking war on now, folks, not one of those little bushfire conflicts like Panama, but an honest-to-Heaven Warre, like World War II, and it can't be fought without you!" Of course, that would have required far more virtù on Bush's part than he has. Or any of his opponents, for that matter. John "Akatsukami" Braue Monday, June 10, 2002 |
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