View From the Top > Esteemed Reader

Books are apt to turn reason out of doors.
You find men talking everywhere
from their memories,
instead of
from their understanding.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:
Yesterday, I had a conversation with Chronogram’s correspondent in Baghdad, Lorna Tychostup. She is there with the people of a city living under the gun. The mobilization of us forces of destruction (leashed, but in readiness, at the time of this writing) includes hundreds of cruise missiles promising a devastation several times worse than that wreaked on Hiroshima.

Lorna sounded grounded, strong, full of contained intensity and feeling. “Hundreds of thousands of people in this city have no place to go,” she said. “We are all terrified.” Lorna and the people of Baghdad awaited the report from chief un weapons inspector Hans Blix with trepidation and braced themselves for terror from the skies if the analysis was unfavorable. “They are so grateful I’m here,” she said. And finally: “Tell everyone I love them.” Knowing the risk she is in, and knowing she knew it also, I winced and felt a tear slide down my cheek.

In contrast to Lorna’s first-hand report is what we hear in the news. For, in general, the news does not represent what is real. We are sold a selection of meaningless data for which we pay dearly with the precious stuff of attention. From spun “facts” we generate useless, ill-formed opinions. And we proceed to live in the fantasies spawned from the miasma of pseudo-knowledge that is served up like the indigestible faux-fare of a tv dinner. We slurp down the news, barely assimilating, rather feeding massive psychological tapeworms of delusion.
The news is an ongoing record of crimes—crimes that have been exposed and covert crimes in progress. As self-interest abounds in this sub-human society, crime is ubiquitous—crimes against nature, against humanity, against God. And there is a special romance in crime, that attracts our weakest part, which is ever-capitalized upon in the news. I find myself parched beyond thirst for something truthful, human, something positive from the objects of the news.

What happened? How was our population been confounded into a state of torpidity? We demonstrate such ignorant passivity that with barely a peep a presidency is stolen and placed in the hands of a sociopath—an emotionally disturbed adolescent that can barely read his speechwriter’s scripts coherently, let alone use the awesome might at his disposal to serve life on earth. How easily the population has been duped, passively accepting obvious absurdities and showing no signs of stopping!

Our attention is so weak, so pulverized by incessant stimulation that we have lost the sense of how to discern what is true from what is patently preposterous. So when the news feeds us a story about weapons of mass-destruction in the hands of a criminal government, we accept it. We even miss the tragicomic irony that the description equally describes the heedless, self-serving Bush regime. And the kicker is that we proceed to postulate arguments and theories premised on their propaganda, thereby validating a fallacious position.

So what is true? It is true that Lorna is in Iraq risking her life for others in response to her conscience. It is News. And in general we can know what is true based in the feeling a thing arouses in us. But we must be watchful, ready to respond to what we notice in ourselves, eschewing the stream of useless information and culling out what corresponds to the intelligence that is common to all. Then, perhaps, we can be free.
“Exciting, all this, isn’t it?” someone said after I described my conversation with Lorna, which was the day after the massive worldwide peace demonstrations. “Perhaps exciting isn’t the word,” I replied. “This is real.”
—Jason Stern