How can you not love ice dancing?
I’m back after a week of visiting a tropical isle where my only form of mental exertion was figuring out how to bash tennis balls back in the general direction of their origin without having to stop sipping on my rum drinks. I couldn’t quite get it right so I retreated to the veranda to spend my time on trashy novels without having to worry about yellow projectiles upsetting my mojito schedule.
So, I missed the two big stories of the week: the Cheney shooting and the Olympic snowboarder who tried a trick as she was headed for the gold medal and fell on her ass. Which is more “dog bites man” I wondered, when I got back yesterday: Cheney not giving a shit about who gets hurt, or a snowboarder being a show off? Didn’t give it too much thought as I concentrated on getting back to a place with a television and renewing my quadrenninal love affair with ice dancing.
But, in the cold light of a Minnesota Monday, I thought of some more similarities between the two non-stories. Other than the disdain they truly deserve, it’s that the press seems to elevated them both, particularly the Cheney story, to the level of say, a Presidential blow job.
It doesn’t take much to distract the press from the boring work of actually doing some work. Bush going on the stump behind his cynical “addicted to foreign oil” crap? Who cares what’s behind that? That would require doing some background stories on what Bush’s energy policy has been to date. Oh, yeah, I forgot that’s secret.
I could come up with some more, but I have to only 50 pages left to find out if Dirk Pitt gets the girl and the treasure. (Sorry, fell asleep on the plane.)
But you get the point: any fortuitous incident that can be covered with a minimum of reportorial expertise and a minimum expectation of the attention span of the audience is just what our press is after today.
What’s next? Somebody’s house burning?
Film at 10.
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