TROUBLED TIMES

I’ve been trying very hard not to comment upon the news all that much of late.

After all, recently it’s got so depressing that I can’t imagine that anyone wants to hear any more about it, especially when they’re hopping across here from somewhere that they might actually be spending their time on looking for a bit of “fun” or “relief” from the troubles of this world.

Then there’s always the tricky little matter that I might merely expose my own ignorance, especially given that I have been becoming far less well-read (about, oh, just about everything!) in recent months, and that my opinion is just as likely to be born out of as much ignorance as everyone else’s.

Not that this generally stops the world and his wife (or her husband… or partner… this can get complicated if you don't want to offend anyone… best just stick with "the world") from “reckoning” about things in all sorts of places online, a fact that I have been known to sincerely tut and frown about from time to time, whilst then going on to add my own irrelevant views into the great miasma.

But then, certain stories catch my eyes, or my ears, and I do find myself having an opinion, whether the story is a rather trivial one like Kate Bush not wanting cameras, smartphones and tablet devices to be used at her concerts, or something far more disturbing, like the fact that some people are cutting the heads off journalists and posting the images on the internet…

The fact that these two stories are, in a manner of speaking, connected is also quite bizarre, but both speak to the way in which we are engaging with the world nowadays.

The idea that many of us are choosing to experience our experiences “second-hand” whilst actually being somewhere really is a strange new phenomenon, and seems to be finally triggering a mild backlash of the viewer “not really being there” kind, which is one that I do actually kind of agree with, even though I choose for myself to rarely be anywhere very much nowadays.

But when people pay a fortune for tickets to be somewhere, and then spend their evening staring at a little screen instead of the event that’s unfolding right in front of them, then something appears to have gone wrong somewhere. After all, the ability re-experience it later seems mildly absurd when that experience is going to be from a device that is far less efficient at recording it than you’d want it to be, and your own eyes and ears might have enjoyed it far more if you’d been paying attention at the time rather than checking all of the time about whether your phone is on.

Granted, I’m not a huge fan of concert-going anyway, but that, I suspect, is just me. I tend to prefer to hear the actual performer performing rather than have to hear a thousand non-professionals joining in with their own toneless renditions, which is why I have a home entertainment system.

However, it seems just as bizarre to me that nowadays people are filming themselves as they escape from something like an air crash instead of just running for their lives…

It’s no longer enough to merely survive, it seems. Now you have to be seen to survive, and, perhaps, have an interesting enough record of the occasion to profit by it.

But then, that culture is precisely what feeds the monster at the other end of the scale. The shocking impact of posting a video to show the world what you’re prepared to do gets exactly the response that you’d expect it to in a world where viral imagery and instant sound bites is the common currency, and the culture of “Have you seen this…? Isn’t it dreadful…? Let’s have another look and pass it on…” is the norm.

Fear is the key, and fear, along with its soul-mate, panic, travels far more quickly in this age than love, or understanding, or reasonableness, or truth.

So, when the bloody, nasty and downright despicable murder of a journalist is committed, it now gets committed in the full glare of the spotlight of publicity, and the sick, twisted reasoning that brings a person to believe that this is an acceptable thing to do gets far more airplay than some anonymous butchery in a back street ever would.

Which is, of course, precisely why it gets performed that way, and, sadly, performed is the word we need to use here, because everything, no matter how brutal or wrong it might be, is becoming a performance nowadays, although the coliseums and bullrings are just screens in our own little rooms.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the profession of journalism, and have regularly criticized some of its excesses over the years, and a lot of what I believe still has an awful lot of validity, but I do have to admit that some aspects of the profession are actually quite important, and that, in a world where people are being killed seemingly without anyone trying to stop it, or without letting the rest of us know just what the hell is really happening, then that kind of journalism - not the bin-diving, sleaze-merchant, phone-hacking kind - does have value.

Of course it does.

And nobody, nobody, nobody deserves to have happen to them what happened to James Foley this week.

Nobody.

Damn it, where was the humanity in that? Where’s the civilization? Do we really want to bring back the barbarism and butchery of the dark ages?

Seven ****ing minutes…??! (No, I did not watch it… although some once-seen, never-to-be-forgotten images burnt their way into my mind courtesy of my Twitterfeed) It’s beyond insanity… (No matter how much you try to look at things from another point of view and think about how it must feel to think that your entire culture is at stake…) Even the maniacs running the French Revolution at the peak of the Terror were more humane than that...

Justifying such actions by claiming that hundreds of innocents are dying unremarked upon and unrecorded every day is no argument, when all you’re doing is adding another death to the bloody tally, just as the argument that two small atomic bombs killing thousands might have saved thousands more really hold water to the person who was sitting underneath that bomb when you dropped it.

Meanwhile other wars rage on, in the Middle East, and on the streets of America, and elsewhere, and the fuzzy logic which implies that disagreeing with what a country is doing automatically makes you a hater of their customs and culture is beginning to feel somewhat alarming.

“I did this… I am this…! You are this… so you must do this…” isn’t an argument that holds up, because belonging to the one does not make you have to do the other, and neither does “We are doing this, and we have this system of beliefs; If you disagree with what we are doing then you obviously hate our religion…”

Just like every unarmed black kid isn’t a criminal, every defender of the law isn’t a racist, every Israeli isn’t a warmonger, and every critic of such military action isn’t an anti-semite.

And in these increasingly troubled times, sometimes we really need to try and remember that.