By the time I got to the middle of the paper I was just about ready to pack it in: massive fraud in the EU sugar market, Karadzic boycotts trial, helicopter crash kills 14 American soldiers in Afghanistan, death toll rises after Baghdad bombings, ex French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua sentenced to three years including one year behind bars, and so on.
Then it was time to switch on the radio and to go online for "news of fresh disasters", as the Beyond the Fringe team used to say: UN defiant after Kabul killings, car bomb kills scores in Peshawar, Agassi admits use of crystal meth, etc. etc.
In the face of so much misery and mayhem, it seems invidious to dwell on one's own sensibilities and disarray. But what exactly is going on? Is the world objectively a much more dangerous place than it was when I was growing up? Is it really falling apart at the seams? Is it that it becomes more difficult to shrug off the evidence of the outside world as one gets older? Or is it that, fed almost exclusively on a diet of the IHT (the quintessential world newspaper) and news from the BBC World Service, I get a somewhat bleaker view of the world than someone, say, reading the Telegraph, listening to Radio 4 and watching BBC TV?
I have the same feeling. The world seems more and more corrupted, endangered and twisted than it used to and maybe the way mass media present the news has really somehow changed, but mostly I sincerely suppose, the world is continuously pushing the edges as far as it can go and slowly destroying itself. Lorne
ReplyDeleteHi Lorne
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. It's funny, isn't it, when I was growing up during the Cold War and in the "shadow of the bomb", we were constantly told what a dangerous world we were living in. But I have never again felt as safe and secure as I did then!
Best
Barnaby