Theater of the Absurd: The News and Fort Hood

I completed a variety of errands yesterday and rewarded myself with a pint of hard cider at a pub in town. They had CNN going with the sound off, and it emerged there'd been a shooting incident at Fort Hood. But even with the sound off, I could see that Wolf Blitzer and everyone else at CNN simply had no idea what was going on, no information to impart. They had satellite photos of Texas they kept zooming down on, as if they could zoom down far enough so that the state and county and everything would widen out so far that eventually we could see into the shooter's mind. Wolf kept walking back and forth, the camera kept cutting to pictures of the Fort Hood gate and people standing in front of buildings with microphones and all kinds of things and it was just absurd. All they knew was that people had been shot, and nobody knew why really. But they couldn't just say that, because it's their business to pretend to know what's going on, so they just kept showing the satellite photos over and over again.

I'm in the news business myself, see, and have been for a couple of decades, so this matters to me.

If you ask me how to learn more about the world we live in, how to get reliable information, I'm probably going to sigh, let my shoulders sag, and tell you that the cable news and network news people basically don't have anything to tell you. They don't care about knowing stuff, and don't have budgets to send reporters out if they did. The newspapers, to their great and ongoing credit, are still working their stories. (During the afternoon and evening, the Times' Lede blog was the best source of information on the Fort Hood story.) When you get down to it, on any given subject, there are people who have their ears to the ground and know what's going on. If you care about the subject, scan the available sources until you find those people. Best I can tell you.

But there's one person who's (in my humble opinion) the dean of American journalists, and that's James Fallows. In the coming hours and days we'll hear a lot of fatuous opinions and a lot of perfunctory stuff—I hear secondhand, for instance, that Larry King asked a general, "Is it safe to assume that the gunman had some serious mental problems?” Yeah, Larry, that's a safe assumption. Fallows was able to cut through all this clutter and say the one meaningful thing: There's no meaning to this or any other random atrocity. We want to learn a lesson from it, but there's no lesson to learn. Some guy was under stress, and he freaked out, and he did it in a destructive way. We'll hear bits and pieces about Nidal Malik Hasan over the next few days—CNN has footage of him in a convenience store, as if that could possibly shed any light on this—but none of it will tell you anything worth knowing. Trust me on this, folks. Most people are good, decent human beings, and you can count on them to do the right thing, and help each other. But sometimes people just go off the rails. You think you know them, but then you bump up against the cold fact that in the wrong place at the wrong time, anyone really, really is capable of anything. And it doesn't mean anything. Turn off the cable TV and just hug the people you care about, if it bothers you, and pet your pets. And stay alert. It's a beautiful but often dangerous world. I wish the latter weren't true, but it is. Sorry about that.