Disaster? What Disaster? Hey, What’s the Score?
Well happy Boxing Day. Nothing like a gigantic global disaster to perk things up.
I’ve just been ranting at Crooked Timber about the bizarre shortage of coverage on US television. Silly me, I thought that what with the number of countries affected, the vast geographic sweep from Somalia to Indonesia, picking up the Maldives, southern India, Bangladesh, Burma, and Thailand on the way, and the immense number of people known killed already which is sure to rise astronomically once the counting gets going – that even here in the notoriously uninterested provincial triviality-obsessed US, people would be mildly interested. But if they are, you would never know it from looking at tv news. India and Indonesia might as well be orbiting Zeta Reticuli. They might as well be a few billion light years away as opposed to a few thousand miles. Ho hum. Well hey, there’s snow in North Carolina today, so that needs a few minutes of air time too, along with this pesky little tsunami-thing over in Asia or Nepal or wherever it is. Have another beer.
Charitable of God to wait for Christmas to end before sending in the floods and plagues
So that the Pope wouldn’t be too busy. Good point.
Peter, we have people there.
The US news may not have noticed (whereas the UK news most definitely has) but the US government has pledged a very large sum of money in aid (more than any other single country). Which is something.
True. And the US news did notice after a few hours – it was just bizarrely slow about it. It’s certainly covering it now. But during the day on Sunday the paucity of coverage and the continued attention to trivia was very surreal.