Spoons and Cigarettes.

I sat down tonight for a meal served to me with an ice cream scooper. I shared a table with assorted undesirables of the rigid 2nd Marines and Al Asad food services – a Lance Corporal who chewed with his mouth open, an obese and political KBR worker, a squinty Captain who wanted to exchange TBS stories, an evangelical Navy Lieutenant Commander who thought I needed some saving and a delicate little laundry worker from Nepal who shoveled sloppy selections into his mouth with two dirty hands, giggling, amused at my obvious unease.

It was the perfect storm of bad manners, bad food, bad politics, and bad memories. It didn’t take long before I couldn’t take it anymore and excused myself for a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I’ve found the theater of my rubbing my hands over my eyes, patting my shirt pockets for a fresh pack and excusing myself for a smoke is believable enough to sell an exit and more polite than the alternative of plunging a plastic spoon down my throat in protest of this sort of social misery.

I smiled. They smiled back. I feigned exit, entered an adjacent room, sat down and watched the news. Five minutes later I got up and went looking for that plastic spoon...

It’s exasperating. This week we were bombarded with news of dangerous North Korean bravado, failures at Doha, Austrian incest, Mexican melt-down, Chinese cyber-espionage, doom and gloom speculations on Afghanistan, daily Geithner bashing and the requisite chronicles of celebrity tragedy. Moderators of seriously named programs ask less than serious questions of even less serious guests, interrupting to answer themselves. It’s a serious waste of our time.
This sort of coverage ensures we’ll all begin (and end) each day just as miserably as everyone we’ve just seen reported on. It’s enough to drive anyone to pass on the cream and bring on the Kailua with a first cup of morning coffee. And second. And third. And...f*ck it, just hand me the bottle.

Sure, the media’s responsible for reporting news with the integrity and accountability of WorldCom. But we’re responsible for watching, approving, and demanding more blood tomorrow. And let’s not forget those that create the events that lead to such awful news to begin with; they deserve blame for, well, making news so awful to begin with...
Dangerous North Koreans threaten pan-Asia (and the rest of us for that matter), not Japanese. Backwards Arab petrolcrats (and even further backwards Arab fundamentalists) undermine the Arab-block’s relevancy in the next century, not the West. Sexual criminals don’t deserve an hour on Dr. Phil to lament their “condition”, or explain their own “tragic history”. They deserve equal protection under the law, due process, and, if proven guilty, a very, very long prison sentence.

But it’s not that networks report such horrible things that bother me (horrible things happen in the world, I want to know). What bothers me is the manner in which they report them. It’s a noisy and casual, amateurish and ambivalent sort of reporting. What bothers me even more is the manner in which some watch and bemoan and whine and criticize and then carry on complacently, just happy none of it is happening to them. Though what bothers me most of all is the arrogance and hopeless attitudes of that self-absorbed, defeatist, fragile lot that acts as if we are the first to see crime, war, poverty, violence, financial ruin, terrorism, famine, failed states, disease, or genocide; these that forget their own grandparents endured a stock market crash, unemployment, a two-front war, neglected poor, greedy elite, and the same left-right politics just two generations ago. To say nothing of the fact that, during the prohibition years anyway, they were expected to endure such things sober (and in black and white).

It’s an odd time we’re in – a reality-based moment defined by the hyper-sensitive, hyper-connected, hyper-emotional, and hyper-aware. We have more resources for learning than ever before and less desire to access them. More opinions and less questions. WE TALK TO EACH OTHER NOW MORE THAN EVER, WITH SO MUCH LESS TO SAY.

We’re quick to volunteer from the comfort of our home, eagerly participating in yesterday’s Earth Night to “make a difference”, but so less eager to use that same hour to volunteer locally, or help our own kids with their homework. When our economy soars, we’re fast to absorb a mortgage we can’t afford. When it tanks and we lose our home, it’s someone else’s fault. We join hundreds of thousands to protest the G20, but won’t admit (or don’t understand) that free trade lowers prices and creates jobs, jobs makes wages, wages buy food and medicine and some guy in Kuala Lumpur earned a wage that fed his family for making that stupid hat you’re wearing while you protest the job he made it at. And we’re hungry for “developing” headlines around the world. Suspicions become convictions and assumptions become facts, all instantly – and between text messages – and without any sort of analysis, critical thought, or investigation. Our i-world gives us the ability to know most everything about anything, anywhere and at any time, but the inclination to medicate, press play and worry about it tomorrow.

Yes, it’s an odd time indeed. But there is a solution to all this, in the short term anyway: always have a way to kill yourself, or be excused. For this, I’d recommend the plastic spoon, and pack of cigarettes…