There is a classic novel in which, according to my protean memory, a theory of infinites is illustrated. By this meme, any process involves cycles in which you begin and end in one spot. A stoont at the piano begins by sitting still, then she wracks her body in pumps and fades, trying to work out the sonata, and finally as she masters the art, she returns to sublime inertia. A talisman of this fever in the story is a figuerine of an African tribal mother in simplicity and serenity, and in the last scene, some Welshman, probably named Rupert, meets his fate by going naked into the Nordic snows, a return to splendor.
This reminds me of Sid Caesar.
When I was young, a long time ago, conversation, communion, all culture was local. There was not a frenzy about politics and The Other because none of it threatened us. Our sense of the outside was in movies, which were not, we understood, real, and Amos and Andy on the radio. Jokes were apocyryphal and stories were cast strictly with a local dramatis personae.
TV changed all that. I remember the evening it happened, when a game we worked up in the neighborhood (and in those days, all our games had to be local) was busted down by a mother who drove up calling for her son. "Morris Lynn, come on, he's a'gonna answer the sixty four thousand dollar question!"
We lifted up our eyes unto the hills, from which cometh our Cable, forevermore.
And so, no more was it the weather or the humidity or Brother Vanderslyce's scheme to build a new library for the church, it was McCarthy and Quiz Shows and Brown vs Board of Education, it would be Freedom Riders and Sit Ins, and also our own elementary school class clown was not nearly as funny as Sid and Imogene and Lucy, and, truth to tell, Edward R Murrow had even more gravitas than my Daddy.
We knew all this already. For weren't the football heroes of our town always crunched when we moved into the wider regionals? Perfectly comprehensible: the wider is the pond, the bigger the frog who prevails.
What Facebook and other free access sites have done is return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when all that is heard in the land is "Hot enuff fer ya?" and "Welp, went out to Lub's last night, and he wuz outta Chaw Man." We are a vast sea, walled into tiny villages, in which we allow only our neighbors, surnamed "friends," and the exchange is as banal as any heard in the Appalachians.
For example, you're reading this now instead of that report in Vanity Fair everyone is talking about.