What We're Not Reading

A good friend of mine loves a thriller, now that she's later in life and some of the other thrill is gone. We were speaking of The Unknown Terrorist which she has not read and which I was trying to describe. The thing about this book is its apparent theory that terror turns us primal, less human, and thus the thing we are trying to protect, this Life and Society and Democracy and so on becomes that much less worthy of protection. She said, and she may be right, "I don't know why we think 9/11 is so remarkable. Where we are wrong is in thinking that They want what we have. They despise what we have."
She went on to tell me of a woman she knows who has had no other career but marriage and who now lives off the avails of divorce, alone in a mansion of more than 8,000 sq.ft. This same woman has other homes and cars and the things we collect because we are us and strong and free and because we can. When you think about it, this is obscene.
And so my friend, who lives in Florida most of the year but who is not American, nor Canadian, nor Jamaican really nor British though she sounds it, this friend who is a child of the universe who has a right to be said "the problem is the media."
It inflames me, always, when The Media is blamed for Whatever It Is, and in fact The Media takes a hard knock in The Unknown Terrorist.
But my friend is of the media and said the issue is that there is no longer anything we know as news available to most of the population. What passes for news in the place where she lives most of the year, a small town in hellish Florida, is local and only local, who said what to whom and who may have stolen the boy scouts' pocket money...what happens in the World is never reported nor considered and the only "world vision" available in this small town might be Fox or a talk show or Judge Judy.
Now, this is worth considering.
I have many friends who would consider themselves intellectuals or artists or both and who take it as a badge of honour that they don't read newspapers; many of them are still adhering to that dated fashion of Irony and so boast that they know Gawker best, or The Superficial, or Defamer, all of which have done us the favour of being literal as to their content.
When one of my styley friends said to me long ago, when I was still a newspaper reporter, that she never read the paper I took her to task. We live in a democracy and so it is our civil DUTY to now the news however we learn it, in paper or online, to let Them know we're watching, to pay attention. This is why media is the fourth pillar. This is why there is something like a right to photograph Lindsay Lohan after a bad night.
It's been a long time since I've raised this argument but it seems germaine just now. Pay attention. Yeats said the world falls apart when "the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Interesting that he could not have foreseen that lacking conviction could go even further, toward a concerted effort to not merely lack conviction but lack even the interest to know what might be worth being convinced about.
If a bomb drops in the woods and no one hears it, did Lindsay Lohan go to rehab for another round?