Less than 48 hours after Kurt Warner, quarterback of the St. Louis Rams, hoisted aloft the big silver trophy and crowed, “Thank you, Jesus!” a plane fell out of the sky and into the Pacific Ocean, killing 88 people.
For most of us, both events — the frenzied aftermath of the Super Bowl and the solemn scene of rescue craft hauling luggage from the choppy waters — came to us via televised images, streams of visual information that arrived like brightly wrapped packages. Our psychic doorsteps are cluttered with such accidental and sometimes excruciating juxtapositions: happy athletes and, a few days later, grief-crushed mourners. Winners and losers. Triumph and tragedy.
Television, in fact, relishes such extremes, such stubborn opposites, because they supply a shot of pure drama to our otherwise dull, quotidian days. If you’ve ever watched an unedited home movie (or certain PBS documentaries), then you know what television would be like without those moments of wild joy and passionate sadness.
Trouble is, in the contemporary era of instant news, those images show up not only rapidly but randomly, so that the information they carry is like a series of bewildering dispatches from everywhere all at once.
How should we react? What are we supposed to think?
Sometimes it’s easy to know, of course: a plane crash is bad, the success of a nice guy such as Warner is good. Other times, though, it’s not so easy, and the fact that we have so much information from so many different sources — newspapers, television, radio, the Internet — means that we’re constantly falling behind in the essential task of processing that information, of figuring out what to do with it all.
I was deeply offended when I first heard Warner’s remark, and I wasn’t sure why. News of the plane crash helped explain my distaste to me: If God was willing to help the Rams win a football game, as Warner’s gratitude seemed to imply, then why hadn’t God taken the time to keep a plane from crashing? Was the outcome of the Super Bowl more significant than the lives of 88 people, some of whom were, I daresay, just as devout and deserving of happiness as Warner?
Those are the kinds of questions that occur in the wake of constant assaults of information, and neither the questions nor the assaults will be going away anytime soon. So we had better find a way to deal with them, to set up some apparatus whereby our dazed incomprehension might be gently accommodated, our frustration and anger delicately assuaged. These days, we see so much and understand so little.
Of a troubled character in Willa Cather’s “Lucy Gayheart,” the narrator says, “His mind could not find a comfortable position to lie in.” That is the contemporary dilemma: For minds surrounded by information, the possibility of comfort sometimes seems impossibly remote.
I don’t know what media can or should do about that, other than perpetually remind us that we ought to go beyond a single source of information–and single kind of information–if we hope to find any solace. Knowing about an event doesn’t mean just knowing what happened; it means exploring one’s own reaction as well.
What continues to haunt me was my overwhelmingly negative response to Warner’s sweaty testimonial. Just after he cried, “Thank you, Jesus!” I muttered, “That’s obscene,” with a fierceness that startled the Diet Pepsi-swilling, Dorito-downing multitude with whom I was watching the game.
Truth to tell, my word choice startled me as well, even though it was based on a longtime dislike of mouthy do-gooders. I’ve always bristled at public proclamations of faith. They smack of self-aggrandizement, of coy little stripteases of the soul.
They also seem instantly to render one a prime candidate for hypocrisy. Bragging about personal piety is just asking for trouble.
In the week or so since Warner tipped his helmet to Jesus, however, I’ve come to a peculiar and unsettling realization. If there’s a hypocrite on the premises, it’s probably me. Here’s why:
Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker recently shot off his mouth to a Sports Illustrated reporter, trashing virtually everybody except white Anglo-Saxon males. Early last week, he was suspended from baseball until May 1 for his loutish tirade.
That prompted a lot of liberal-minded, 1st Amendment-spouting folks — such as me — to fuss and holler and say, hey, Rocker may be a bigoted idiot, but there’s no law against being a jerk, and don’t we believe in free speech?
A lot of those same folks, though, were the ones who cringed at Warner’s mini-sermon after the Super Bowl, complaining that he ought to keep his religious opinions to himself, that God and the gridiron don’t mix.
We were willing, that is, to defend Rocker’s right to say stupid, hateful things, but we were miffed by Warner’s decision to say gentle, spiritual ones.
Doubtless, there are mitigating aspects to both positions. But as the media bring us events hot off the griddle, such comparisons are not only inevitable, but necessary.
When Flight 261 plunged in the ocean a week ago, the champagne glasses probably still hadn’t been gathered up from the Rams’ locker room. How do we cope with such unfathomable juxtapositions?
I am reminded of Leon Wieseltier’s line in his 1998 spiritual memoir, “Kaddish”: “What death really says is: think.”
First, we look. Then, one hopes, we think.
