No Ordinary Time
30th August 2015
Richard Fernandez looks under the media radar.
The news spotlight is on the US electoral drama. Everything outside the circle of media brilliance is momentarily in shadow, most especially Obama administration’s governance record. They persist in a singular state of invisibility. Scandals, domestic crises, foreign conflicts — none have been resolved. It is just that the newspapers don’t talk about them any more. Matthew Continetti of the National Review thinks that the normally raucous anti-war groups, even Obama himself, have fallen deliberately silent.
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The War — if one can call it that — exists without being acknowledged. China, South America, Russia, the border, inhabit the same limbo. These, like massive shadowy cliffs, have faded into an out of focus background under shallow depth of field coverage of the media lens. All we see sharply are the tiny, minutely defined candidates under a harsh glare. Occasionally actual events intrude in the form of attention-grabbing tragedies that have inexplicably multiplied.
We shudder at the sight of drowned Syrian children washing up on Libyan beaches; shake our heads at asphyxiated truckloads abandoned by people smugglers who took the money and ran; wonder at what the meltdown in China might portend. But we shudder without much understanding; these tragedies seem to have a kind of meteoric quality, arriving from parts unknown and vanishing to the same distant parts of the media solar system.
The more widely read know these portents are merely the tip of the iceberg, visible simply because they ride above the water. There’s a vague realization that what really matters is under the surface; inside the imploding countries of the Middle East, unfolding in Eastern Europe, or hatching in Beijing. We know the real reservoirs of broken humanity pools are in regional sumps, too poor and exhausted to run any further. The size of Syrian refugee camps in Jordan defy belief; literally stretching out of sight. But that’s all it is, a picture on a page.