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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive.
Editorial: 5/7/99 If being self-involved ever became an Olympic sport, the voice on the other end of the phone line would belong to the team captain. How dare I spend so much time on my radio program on genocide in Kosovo, it sputtered. What about the genocide at Waco? I replied that anyone who equated the suicide and murder by cult members who worshipped David Koresh with mass slaughter in the Balkans was a member of the Tim McVeigh fan club. I then did what any reasonable person would have done. I hung up. The caller later phoned my supervisors, claiming that I had insulted him by calling him a lunatic. I didn't, but that was an oversight. Then there was the call claiming to be from a minor official with a civil rights group. He also called the suits in the corner offices, claiming that I had said that the slaughter in Littleton was a surprise because most high school violence takes place in the black inner cities. I did not say that. What I said was that Littleton and other incidents like it should stop the perception that most high school crime was in the black inner cities. The caller, though, was so sure of what he thought he heard that he refused to even speak to me. Normally, an African-American activist and a white survivalist would be like oil and water, snake and mongoose, Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson. But these two were, in seperate but equal ways, masters of selfishness, self-absorbed sponges capable of sucking up tragic events and turning them into moments straight out of Seinfeld. Never mind the rape and murder in the Balkans, I only care about the jack-booted storm troopers from the Federal government and their black helicopters. Too bad about Columbine High School, but I'm only interested in any insults, real or imagined, aimed toward black people. This pretty well fits with America's Balkanized concept of itself at the dawn of a new century. We are all the public. Yet anything with public as its prefix, from the public good to public schools to public transit, has been systematically trashed. Whether we live in isolated suburbs where we don't know our neighbors, or city communities where we're afraid to know our neighbors, the concept of a larger community has been replaced with the cocoon of four walls and five hundred channels. Members of Congress don't seem to care about American men and women in harms way in the Balkans. They just want to blame either the President, or each other, for a stumbling policy and a downsized military. We don't really seem too interested in blaming anyone except someone else for the periodic gunfire and death in our schools. We've become a walled-in culture, segregated, isolated, adrift. Small moments in popular culture tell us a lot about where we are as a people. The TV sitcom "Home Improvement" is signing off after an eight-year run. But the culture has changed so much since 1991, when it went on the air, that the show's passing is only being noticed because it's probably the last family situation comedy you'll ever see on television. The network executives admit they'd never buy a show like that now. No sharp elbows to it, no edge, no drifting solitary people, and after all, who wants to see a show about Mom and Dad and the kids without sexual innuendo, hints of violence, or idiots as main characters? The networks admit they're not programming for everyone. They're programming for young, white, males, the ones with the most money. Our television executives know what we've become. That's why each channel on the tube programs to a different slice of the demographic pie. Hey, no one has anything in common anyway, so we have hundreds of channels aimed at hundreds of types of people. So we have networks aimed at teenaged girls, young black men, older suburban white people, urban yuppies, and so on. And it's looking like we as a people are so involved in ourselves, that no matter how big the tragedy, we can only look at it one way---how does it affect what I care about? But what about the common good, the national interest, our public policies? Don't bother me, or I'll change the channel. |
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