We Are Not Alone


Wherein Our Heroine Examines America.
I've just about given up on U.S. television news. It's disturbing to me in the same way Disney World is disturbing. Nothing is out of place at Disney. Not a blade of grass is un-polished, un-manicured, un-trimmed. Everything appears to be "sanitized for your convenience." I'm not one to bemoan the lack of tacky tawdriness in everyday life. I prefer Times Square now to Times Square twenty years ago. But Disney takes shiny, polished perfection several steps too far in my view. So do U.S. nightly news programs. The anchors are generally beautiful people: they don't have a hair out of place and they never stumble over their words. They have two expressions: bright and cheery (covering the latest Mall opening, elementary science fair, or other tame subject), or stern and censorious (the other ninety-eight percent of the news - mostly violent crime or car wrecks). They are careful not to shock sensibilities by showing too much, but in doing so I believe they often numb their viewership to the horrors that people inflict on one another.

Both experiences also leave you with this curious impression that the U.S. takes up at least eighty-five percent of the world. There is a sense that little happens beyond our borders unless it involves some American citizen hapless enough to travel to non-U.S. shores. In the news, it's an American getting killed or injured abroad. At Disney, it's the national domestication of international experience. EPCOT's little capsules of various countries may be cute, but they are as international as the food at your local grocery and similarly limited in their scope (can you imagine EPCOT's "Haitian Village"?).

I love America. I think the Constitution is a brilliant document and I enjoy the freedoms that the Bill of Rights grant (in writing for this site, I exercise those freedoms daily). There is a youthful energy, a spirit, about Americans that makes me smile and feel that just about anything is possible, like watching a teenager with choices and learning and life before her. But like that teenager, Americans can be impossibly self-centered know-it-alls. I suppose I love America the same way I love my family: appreciating the good, trying to view the bad clearly and dispassionately, and knowing that we are not the center of the universe just because we are us.

So we watch the BBC World News. It is reassuring to me that we are not, in fact, alone. We are not eighty-five percent of the globe. There are events going on outside our borders that don't include American casualties that are truly important. The reporters aren't always scrubbed, blow-dried perfection, and little is sanitized.

Plus, a meteorologist gives the weather report for the entire world. How cool is that?
Posted: Thursday - March 11, 2004 at 08:23 AM         | |

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