Tragedy is a spectator sport
While other people are writing about the arts - literature, the moving picture, music, North European, avant garde, stylish, ironic stuff - I am currently a translator at a tabloid. That means reading loads of gore and trash and death and rape of all sorts and rewriting them for an audience that is actually willing to pay to read these spewings. In the course of my work I have discovered that Malaysia/Taiwan have the best killing and murder down the South China Sea way. We do have limits of course. We don't report on suicides because we don't want copycats. But rape is peachy. As long as the victims don't kill themselves afterwards anyway.
But sometimes even your everyday rapin' and murderin' pales in comparison to the amount of newsprint that good old mother Nature can generate in the span of a moment. She nudges a tectonic plate one way and boom half a civilisation goes down like crumbs and Charon has to start paddling like a motherfucker. What's one dismembered girl compared to thousands buried in concrete and dust? What's a single or even a dozen corpses compared to - I quote a China newspaper story I translated - rows of dead children wrapped in white cloth, like silkworms in their cocoons?
Normally I embrace the fact that I am the definition of not just a pleb, not even merely a non-intellectual, but a counter-intellectual, though I respect genius. Give the people their blood gore and guts man! It's real, at least more substantial than the utterances of economists, the blabbering of politicians, the bleating of reviewers and the mangling of science by idiotic journalists. Face it, shitloads of us are, from the top to the bottom. I know I am criminally stupid though I like to believe I am gifted at recognising a moron when I see one.
But man sometimes it's too much. You know? This is just a long way of saying I'm quite tired of reading and writing about the China Quake. There's only so much sadness you can put down put down what you can. Then it's time to move on to other things, like Britney's underpants. At least those stains aren't tears.
