Besides the repetitious one-story format of cable news since yesterday -- from which I'm doing all I can to escape -- there's cable news's failure to ask some questions:
- "Bush is going to attend services for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting today. When was the last time Bush did that for the troops? Oh, right, never!," comments Leslie at No Quarter blog.
- Bush has ordered the nation's flags flown at half-staff until Sunday. Did Bush order flags lowered after Katrina's devastation and the deaths of hundreds of people?
- It was astonishing to watch news reporters rabidly attack Virginia Tech's president and chief of police. Why don't news reporters regularly attack Bush and Cheney like that?
Sheldon Drobny nails the simplicity of the Virginia Tech tragedy: "[In the case of the] University of Texas massacre in the 1960s ... the assassin was suffering from a tumor in his brain. The Virginia Tech assassin surely had a brain disease of some kind. That is all you need to know."
If you want to get through the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre in a healthier way, don't watch the news for about a week. If you did not need an anti-depressant before this event, you may have to start if you decide to listen, watch, or read the news. These vultures will do you in.
Spend a week with your family and hug them everyday to appreciate them. Take some time off from work and connect with the people you love. Go to the movies or a museum or do anything that interests you to divert your attention from the toxic doses of media poisoning that is about to follow. The MSM will spend endless hours talking about the "why did he do it" or "why did this happen" routines that they always go through. And the answer is there is no answer or rational explanation for this. Given the state of our society, I would ask why this does not happen more often here.
Yesterday's tragedy is a daily event in many other places in the world. Iraqis and their children have to deal with this on a far more wide spread basis than we do in the U.S. And in the case of Iraq, the U.S. has been the chief catalyst to the daily tragedy that is going on there. ...
-- Sheldon Drobny at Huffington Post
One of the ways I'm escaping from the repetitious drone of cable news is listening to yesterday's interview by Diane Rehm of Richard Preston about his new book, "The Wild Trees."
And I'm celebrating the awarding yesterday of Pulitzer Prizes -- particularly those won by Lawrence Wright for his non-fiction book on Al Qaeda, "The Looming Tower," and by Cormac McCarthy for his latest novel, "The Road."
For a bracing respite from the MSM, watch Charlie Rose's interview a couple weeks ago of Lawrence Wright on Google Video. Watch The New Yorker's video of Wright performing his new one-man play about his experiences researching Al Qaeda. Or visit Lawrence Wright's own site, and listen to his keyboard playing in an Austin, Texas blues band.
I've written about The Looming Tower at No Quarter blog many times, and typed up sections of the book for your reading. These are perhaps my two favorites:
- "The Recruits, Of Two Types":
Of A Type, I: What the recruits tended to have in common--besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills--was displacement. ...
- "Tensions: Turki v. Bandar":
Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower has several long sections on Turki. Here's one section from pages 147-148, a sort of backgrounder on the man and his values:
PRINCE TURKI represented a striking contrast to the public image of the royal family. Courteous, charming, and soft-spoken, he was the kind of man many people knew and liked; but he was also guarded and private, and he kept the various parts of his life so carefully separated that no one knew him well. He enjoyed the royal prerogatives of power, but within the Kingdom he lived in an appealingly humble manner. ....
A note about Cormac McCarthy: I first learned about McCarthy's novels when Charlie Rose interviewed Yale Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom in the mid-1990s. Bloom declared McCarthy perhaps the greatest living writer of fiction. Soon after, I bought Blood Meridian, which Bloom said was one of the great novels of the 20th century. I haven't yet read The Road, for which he won the Pulitzer yesterday, but hope to soon.
View the full list of Pulitzer Prizes -- including some great newspaper reporting -- awarded yesterday.
Would that CNNMSNBCFAUX were repetitiously reporting on the Pulitzers -- about which there are endless stories to tell, and terrific fodder for intelligent commentators.
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P.S. Keith Olbermann, to his great credit, did not exclusively cover the Virginia Tech shootings on his "Countdown" last night.