UPDATE April 20 5:30 a.m.: This overnite post from Just Above Sunset sums the situation in Boston and America as well as anything I’ve read. It is long, but well worth reading. Just Above Sunset, by a blogger in Hollywood, is always worth reading.
*
Back in the summer of 1997, I was visiting the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in DC. A shuttle bus pulled up, offering free rides to a new facility across the river in Rosslyn called the Newseum. Admission was free, and the place was interesting.
It was there I first saw the quotation about news being “the first rough draft of history“.
Lots of history has been rough drafted since then, and in fact, two of my grandsons just visited the Newseum on a recent field trip to DC.
I think of my fascinating visit that day, and a later visit to the same place a few years later, as the media is diving into the latest developments in Boston, and in West, Texas (site of the huge explosion with apparently many deaths at a fertilizer plant.)
So…I was listening as two men were talking about the situations this morning. Apparently, there are many Czechs in West, Texas, so one person wondered if Czechoslovakia and Chechnya were one and the same. Wellllll…I mentioned the geographic distinction, and the fact that there is no longer a Czechoslovia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia). Oh…. Geography can be complicated.
Doing my exercise on the stationary bike, the television was tuned to Fox News, bringing the latest. The spin was obvious: Chechnya, Muslim, Russia….
And I could report on what CBS is spinning at this very moment, at 1 p.m. CDT.
No matter.
Perhaps the advice of the New Yorker’s Charles Pierce is best at this point. Here’s his post from this morning.
It’s helpful to find out a little about the place that will now become as familiar as the hanging chad a few years ago.
In time, there might come some common understandings and some reasonable perspectives…one hopes…on the part of most people.
It will be difficult.
Prior Post here: