Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
This is not a piece about Cindy Sheehan. We don’t want to write a piece about Cindy Sheehan. There have been too many pieces about Cindy Sheehan. In fact, not since the televised Tonight Show marriage of Tiny Tim to Miss Vickie has so much media attention been devoted to such insignificant acting out, although “Tommy Lee Goes to College” may, in time, rival that standard.
The unbalanced blind poet Moondog plied the populous streets of New York City for decades, never achieving in a lifetime the attention that Cindy Sheehan gets in one day on the dusty road to Crawford. Of course, it is not recorded that Moondog ever demanded that any of the presidents who served during his long vigil pray with him. If only he had understood the wisdom of P.T. Barnum, who didn’t but could well have said, “Do it in the road to Crawford and the buzzards will come.”
It was reliably reported this week, based on statistical facts currently used by the media to report very few stories, that celebrity magazines are doing boffo business while news magazines are headed toward the collectibles corner of eBay. Elitist hands will be wrung. But there is a reasonable, logical and defensible explanation. When “news” is degraded to the level of recording the every utterance of Cindy Sheehan, then what social scholar can deny that the activities of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, by comparison, merit greater attention from those whose psyches are not unhinged?
Deep thought now, children: When journalists ponder the cosmic meaning of Cindy Sheehan, they are creating the cosmic meaning of Cindy Sheehan, of which there was not much that we should be discussing publicly before the pondering. Think Peter Sellers in the movie “Being There.” Today, only a show co-hosted by Dr. Phil, Oprah and Jerry Springer could do this justice.
For some time now, purveyors of mainstream media have warned that it is dangerous for citizens to get their news from the Internet, because bloggers do not have that magic “filter” so diligently deployed by professional news organizations. Anyone want to make that argument now, post Cindy Sheehan? What’s the frequency, Kenneth, eh, Dan?
As we said in the beginning, this is not a piece about Cindy Sheehan. It is about the continuing self-immolation of journalism, right there on the front page like a monk setting himself ablaze on another road in another time (we can do