onr feels just a mite plagiarized, even if what they are grabbing, or reproducing by coincidence, is something everyonw else roundly condemns. radley balko, the agitator, issues the following expression of stern disapproval.
Responding to my Fox column someone pointed me to this James Wolcott blog entry from a few months ago. It was a stupid thing to write then. In light of recent headlines, it makes him look like a particularly skanky piece of dung today:
I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the
Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of
Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother
Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc
mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the
destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some
of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our
own. Sure, a hearty volcano can be enjoyable. Burning rivers of lava:
so picturesque. But a volcano is stationary, like Dennis Hastert after
a big lunch. It doesn't offer the same dramatic suspense. Hurricanes
are in unpredictable flux. They move, change direction, strengthen,
weaken, lose an eyewall, repair an eyewall; they seem to have volition
and opera-diva personalities. So there's something disappointing when a hurricane doesn't make landfall, or peters out into a puny Category One.
I guess 100,000+ dead in South Asia must've given Wolcott reason to pop his New Year's champagne early.
well below is a column i wrote in 1997 for the philly inquirer. anyway, this thing has completely overwhelmed my ability to watch the weather for entertainment, and i'm sure that's also true of wolcott. i mean shit, rad, give us a break. now also in 1997 i wrote a paper called "why the world trade center has to explode." and on sep 11 i got a couple of emails sayying: you got what you wanted you sick fuck. but a nasty piece of prose or a humor column does not kill people.
A Storm Named Tiffany
By Crispin Sartwell
This is going to be sick; brace yourself.
I root for natural disasters. In particular, I’m a fan of bad weather. The worse the better.
I like nothing more than watching a hurricane track across the Atlantic from Africa until it
demonstrates that Florida is in fact water-soluble. Most nights, I’m glued to the set enjoying the
mudslides and the floods, the tornadoes and the tsunamis: the pain, degradation, homelessness,
and death visited upon us by our abusive mother, nature.
El Nino is cool. El Nino is this rocking disaster-making delinquent loitering off the coast and
lobbing terrible icestorms into Canada. I hope it gets worse, much worse. I’d like to see our
region scraped so clean by the next noreaster that we are forced to abandon North America and
move en masse to central Asia.
Before you condemn me as a nasty sociopathic monster who gets his jollies by immersing
himself in the stomach-churning spectacle of other people’s pain, let me, as the politicians say, be
clear: I am a nasty sociopathic monster who gets his jollies by immersing himself in the stomach-
churning spectacle of other people’s pain.
And pardon me while I observe that you too are a nasty sociopathic etc. Or at least, I am not
the only one who is tuned to the Weather Channel watching some engorged, raging river devour
Sacramento or whatever. Most of us, in the sweet little secret heart of us, are praying for an
earthquake to destroy Lima, as long as there is good videotape.
In fact, other people’s pain is the basic product provided by the entire entertainment industry.
You see? We go to the movies to see gorgeous models being blown to smithereens or getting
into romantic entanglements that would leave most of us rocking back and forth in a rubber room,
mumbling randomly. Do you watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” “Leeza,” “General
Hospital,” “Homicide,” “ER,” “Tom and Jerry,” the NFL, the news? Then go ahead and admit
you are a connoisseur of other people’s suffering. Been to a video arcade lately? Even music is
about inflicting pain. How else do you explain the popularity of Pearl Jam or, for that matter,
opera? Huh? How?
But the hip thing about natural disasters is that they cut us puffed up, paltry people down to
size. Even with our amazing technology, even with our obsessive control over every part of the
environment, even with our climate-controlled vehicles and mega-malls, we can still get our
pathetic little butts smacked by the world. What I want to see tonight on CNN is, like, the Mall
of America slowly collapsing under the weight of seventy-seven feet of snow that fell in a single
hour, pureeing hapless consumers into a kind of human soup.
That would show that even while we’re shopping at Bloomies we’re still mammals running
around on the surface of a planet. Essentially, we’re overgrown, egomaniacal squirrels. We’re
smarter than squirrels, maybe, but not as much smarter as we think we are. We are vulnerable to
reality; we exist at the world’s whim; we are not in charge, thank God. Get used to it.
So next time you’re watching luxury homes lapse into the Pacific or a storm named Tiffany
beating the fecal matter out of Cape Hatteras, get real and admit that you’re actually rooting for
the weather. It’s a lesson in humility. And it’s darn good television.
____________
Crispin Sartwell’s most recent book is Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality.
