Change the Channel?
The situation in Japan remains grim. I can’t reasonably report on this, except to say what’s evident by the photographs, videos and usually-reliable sources: a second reactor may have ruptured. There’s been another burst of radioactivity into the air.
Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The Emperor’s speech adds a feeling of gravity, essentially unfathomable to those who are not there, and maybe even to those who didn’t live, first, through the atomic bombings in that country 75 years ago.
Working my/our way* through The Pain of Others, Sontag writes:
What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering? …For all the voyeuristic lure – and the possible satisfaction of knowing, This is not happening to me, I’m not ill, I’m not dying, I’m not trapped in a war – it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others…
People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid…
She considers the role of TV, and the CNN effect regarding images from the war in Sarajevo, and says now (in the book):
The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television…Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate…The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels….
*in reality, her book-essay – on war imagery – grips with relevance, I sped through.
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Probably by now, my dear readers are wishing I’d write on something else, and somewhere else, which indeed I am doing with most of my time now. But I think the real-time contemplation of the images – and why we look at them, or don’t – is valuable in itself.
And also, maybe it would help the people of Japan, there, to know that people are thinking about their plight.
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