I suppose that if journalism is an art, and if art imitates
life, art is perforce a pretty grim business these days. My last two posts were decidedly grumpy. As a fairly cheerful and generally
good-humored person, I’d hoped to be able to take up a lighter strain this week,
but, honestly, how could I? A week ago
today a couple of murderers—as in married
couple—massacred a large number of my fellow citizens at an office party in
California, the specific site being the husband’s workplace. These two, still enjoying the more moderate
nomenclature of “suspects,” very soon themselves died in the traditional “hail
of bullets” in the obligatory “black SUV”.
The brief
and bloody tragedy concluded, the more leisurely week-long journalistic farce
could then proceed. The first puzzler
was the question of motive. The male murderer was named Syed Rizwan
Farook; his wife was Tashfeen Malik, late of Pakistan via Saudi Arabia. Both were clad as warriors, and they bore
warriors’ weapons. But why should these two go postal? After all, it wasn’t even a post office. The journalistic search for motive lasted
about two days. Its tone was very much
that of adults playing a game of hide-and-seek at a birthday party for
three-year-olds. The little girl hiding
behind the curtain cannot stop giggling, and her distinctively pink shoe is
sticking out about eight inches, but the dutiful parents must not notice such
things. No, their job is stomp noisily
about the room expressing utter befuddlement as to where in the world she might
be. “Look under the couch,” shouts Mom
to Dad. “Maybe she’s under the couch.”
Just as a
diagnosis of “workplace violence” was trending, somebody found a really big
clue. Very shortly after dropping off
her baby at grandma’s but before perpetrating mass murder, Tashfeen Malik had
gone on line to pledge allegiance to the caliph of the Islamic State, who has
called upon all true Muslims to murder as many American infidels as possible in
any way possible. And, oh, yeah, there
was a stockpile of pipe bombs at her house.
This offered the Orange County
Register a new opportunity for nuance:
“Authorities have suggested the possibilities of both a
workplace dispute and international terrorism, or a combination of the two”.
Political
correctness has this in common with fine poetry: it demands of us a willing
suspension of disbelief. One must
accommodate one’s mind to the simultaneous assent to contradictory
propositions. Now
I was trying to follow the story of the San Bernardino massacre while writing
deathless prose concerning a Latin work of Petrarch. I was depending for the “news” upon brief,
intermittent plunges into the Internet.
The circumstances were maximally conducive to “cognitive dissonance”—a
phenomenon frequently encountered in my life, but rarely in so pure a form.
The
moment the previously invisible Muslims took belated form in the journalistic
mind, the media wanted more than anything else to see them and display them to
the American public. As they were
unfortunately in the morgue, the next best thing was to display their now
vacant apartment. I don’t know if the rentier class is truly the most
despicable on earth, but the defuncts’ landlord did nothing to disprove the
suggestion. He allowed free access to
the place to interested people bearing notebooks, microphones, and video
cameras. Such people were very many, and
lo, they were very obnoxious.
So
the first thing I found on the Internet was a video archive of a segment, done
live on MSNBC, of reporter Perry Sanders (on the scene) and his remote handler
Andrea Mitchell (back at studio home base) ransacking the Farook-Malik
domicile. The general vibe was that of a
rugby scrum, or the very last day of the Cézanne exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum. Look! Muslims lived here, real Muslims, sat at that very table! Look!
Muslim furniture, Muslim light fixtures, my God, actual Muslim
wallboard! An early high point is the
discovery of an Arabic primer. Arabic,
Sanders tells us sagely, is “very important.”
Thus the ace reporter moves from
room to room making inane remarks about the quotidian material possessions of
the dead murderers, leading us nowhere nearer to the mystery of iniquity in
their fanaticism, but exposing the vapidity of cable television and the vast
Hick Nation that laps it up. It would
take an H. L. Mencken to describe the activities of his fellow journalists. Seldom has prurience had to sate itself on
such meager scraps. Andrea Mitchell, who
must eventually be a decent person, sent Perry in search of family photographs,
but when he found them, some vestigial sense of decorum kicked in. She didn’t want him to show the pictures of
the unknown and unnamed children; and pretty soon she pulled the plug on the
whole Muslim Apartment Tour, but not before he bags “two books that appear to
be the Koran….They’re in Arabic”.
The week was not yet over. The President’s speech was still ahead, as
was the conversation now underway concerning a strange meaning of the words radical and radicalization.
“Radicalization,” I take it, is something akin to a dread virus, or the
result of a zombie bite on The Living
Dead, except that you can apparently bite yourself, leading to the curious
phenomenon of self-radicalization. But fortunately my time is up.
