nancynall.com » The cruelest month.
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The cruelest month.

I read some­where that domes­tic vio­lence is abnor­mally high in Liv­ingston, Mon­tana. (And I fully real­ize this may be pure b.s., and some­thing my brain thinks it read, but really just made up.) The rea­son? The wind. The wind comes pour­ing off the Yel­low­stone plateau pretty much all year, and grates on your nerves. Makes peo­ple hair-trigger, and they take it out on the peo­ple they share quar­ters with.

Mon­day was a windy day. I guess it was the rem­nants of the nor’easter that poleaxed the, um, nor’east. But it just blew and blew and blew. I had a meet­ing with an edi­tor, and it sounded like the wind wanted to kill us — it was shak­ing the win­dows in fury.

I was dri­ving home when I heard first word of events in Vir­ginia. At that point the death toll was 22. But because no day can be so bad that there isn’t room for it to get a lit­tle worse, some­time this after­noon came the grim punc­tu­a­tion: A five-year-old girl in the sub­urbs here was killed on the play­ground of her ele­men­tary school, after being hit by a falling flag­pole.

I don’t know what’s hap­pen­ing to me, but it seems like the bad news of any given day can always be made worse by the cov­er­age of the bad news. I turned on CNN in search of a suc­cinct here’s-what-we-know sum­ma­tion, and found Paula Zahn won­der­ing “what sort of coun­sel­ing stu­dents will need” to process their feel­ings. On the blogs, the usual yap­ping about guns — hey, let’s arm every­one! Then this will never hap­pen again! (Advice: Move to Detroit, where that’s pretty much the case, and see how well it works. A woman shot at the tires of a truck she thought was tail­gat­ing her, and recently said she thought it was entirely justified.)

I’m con­fin­ing my read­ing on this story to one or two excel­lent news­pa­pers. I solemnly promise to avert my eyes from any chin-scratching colum­nists seek­ing to explain it all to me, to keep the TV turned off, to change to the hip-hop sta­tion if I hear Daniel Schorr rum­bling to life on the sub­ject on NPR. On this story as on no other, all I want are facts. I’ll han­dle my own analysis.

You want to know who finally said some­thing last night that made me feel human again? Jon Stew­art, genius. He launched his show by say­ing some­thing about the day’s awful events, not frown­ing, just speak­ing hon­estly. And then he said some­thing like, “But I’m not going to dwell on this tonight. I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to repress it, try to for­get about it, not think of it at all. And then, in 40 years, someone’s going to spill some juice, and I will explode.” How deft. Acknowl­edg­ment, rue­ful joke, side­step, and not a patron­iz­ing note in the whole thing.

Maybe it’s just the wind get­ting on my nerves. If you need to vent, go ahead. But if Paula Zahn shows up, she is so banned.

Inter­est­ing how much TV reporters chap my ass at times like this. They come on for their live shots with their sad, fur­rowed brows and I want to throw a brick through the screen. Do they take an extra course in j-school on oleagi­nous­ness that we print types didn’t get? Even Brian Williams, a pleas­ant enough fel­low, made me fume, throw­ing in all those ran­dom “trag­ics” and “shock­ings.” Like I can’t fig­ure that stuff out.

And yet, study after study shows peo­ple feel a bond with their local TV newsies, that they believe them when they say “only on chan­nel 5,” and “as we told you exclu­sively at 6.” When I was in news­pa­pers, one year the edi­tor rolled out a col­lec­tion of graphic bugs that had to go in sto­ries where they applied — “only in,” “follow-up,” “break­ing,” etc. Noth­ing else changed, but research had shown read­ers — our read­ers, the ingrates — con­sis­tently believed TV gave them more exclu­sives, follow-ups and break­ing news. As this was demon­stra­bly false, the edi­tor con­cluded it must be sim­ply because they were always say­ing so. And so we had to say so, too.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m in a ter­ri­ble mood. It’s the wind.

Also, it’s the taxes. Do I owe? Why, yes. Do I owe a lot? Why, yes, if you con­sider a sum that would buy a halfway decent Euro­pean vaca­tion “a lot.” I’ll write a check today, and send it off by mail. Screw e-filing; let some clerk open the enve­lope and scan it in. Let them deposit my paper check and watch it plod through the bank­ing sys­tem before it bears its fruit for con­tin­ued war­mak­ing on ter­ror. And no, this isn’t mak­ing me con­sider becom­ing a Repub­li­can. The price we pay for a civ­i­lized soci­ety, etc. I con­sole myself with the fact I made more money than I expected last year. Cold com­fort, but.

So, blog­gage:

Debut­ing on my blogroll with a bul­let, I give you…Dog­house Riley on Tim Russert, etc. Yes, it’s Imus-related, but it’s also a more brac­ing dose of pub­lic com­ment than any hon­ored by the Pulitzer board yesterday.

I was work­ing the other night when the news of the New Jer­sey governor’s car crash first appeared on the NYT web­site. The story said he was injured, was being treated at a hos­pi­tal, “expected to sur­vive,” etc. Then it laid out the laun­dry list: bro­ken femur, six bro­ken ribs on both sides of his chest, bro­ken ster­num (!!!), etc. Well, this was obvi­ously no run-of-the-mill acci­dent. Or maybe it was, sans seat belts:

Do you know how we can tell the dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who were wear­ing their seat­belts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an auto­mo­bile acci­dent? The ones who were wear­ing their seat­belts are stand­ing around say­ing “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.

Jim Mac­don­ald lays out the grim facts too many peo­ple still don’t want to face, pre­fer­ring to be “thrown clear” instead.

Off to the post office. You know what I’ll be mailing.

Posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:09 am
in Current events, Media.

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26 responses to
“The cruelest month.”

  1. brian stouder said on April 17th, 2007 at 10:00 am

    Well, blam­ing all this hor­ror on the wind appeals to me; it is a lot more sen­si­ble (for exam­ple) than dark ref­er­ences to for­eign stu­dents, and less grasp­ing than blam­ing it on incom­pe­tent administrators.

    And it’s fit­ting because sto­ries like these knock the wind out of me, any­more; as a par­ent, see­ing the pic­tures yes­ter­day of somebody’s daugh­ter being car­ried out of a build­ing, or somebody’s son car­ried across a field —  like feed-bags – was just too much.

    And now, we await the copycats

  2. Bob said on April 17th, 2007 at 10:06 am

    Talk about wind!

    You should have been at the West Cen­tral Neigh­bor­hood meet­ing last night!

    Remem­ber the river­bank col­lapse along Thieme Drive some years ago that prompted a great deal of con­cern that some­thing had to be done to sta­bi­lize the bank, and soon?

    Well, that dragged along for a cou­ple of years and then mor­phed into dis­cus­sion of flood-mitigation mea­sures which stirred one or two indi­vid­u­als to take up a cru­sade to save their view of the muddy trench that passes for a river, and the trash veg­e­ta­tion that obstructs the view of it for sev­eral months each year.

    The wind of the wail­ing almost blew away my com­po­sure, but I man­aged to make only one com­ment and stay civil through­out the whole fiasco.

    Before it’s all over, I expect to see a cou­ple of folks using the wild grape vines to bind them­selves to the ailan­thus and mul­berry trees in an effort to keep the chain­saws away.

    Mean­while, the river­bank con­tin­ues to erode and sag, and every period of high water takes a lit­tle more of it. And the costs keep going up. I have to keep remind­ing myself to try to be stoic about it. After all, I chose to live in Fort Wayne.

  3. 4dbirds said on April 17th, 2007 at 10:07 am

    I too am mail­ing a check to the IRS by snail mail for exactly the same rea­son, let them work for it. Vir­ginia Tech is very famil­iar school to me. My kids con­sid­ered it and sev­eral of their friends go there. I will never under­stand these things.

  4. Dave said on April 17th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    I’ve said it many times, I’m sure I’ve said it at some point on NNC, but the only rea­son, I am well con­vinced, that my entire fam­ily is alive today and four out of five of us walked away from being turned over onto our roof after being struck by logs that came off a log truck in Val­dosta, GA, is seat belts. I have no patience with those who argue against them.

    My wife, unfor­tu­nately, got a bro­ken left leg (femur, she sym­pa­thizes with the gov­er­nor for that) out of it.

  5. LA mary said on April 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am

    We had that wind here in LA last week, and my kids, home on spring break, kept call­ing me at work to report on how much our euca­lyp­tus tree was sway­ing, look­ing like it was about to fall. It didn’t, although our power went out for about 30 hours. Noth­ing like get­ting ready for work by flash­light. I have a new appre­ci­a­tion of my refrig­er­a­tor now. Bought it last sum­mer, and it’s made a big dif­fer­ence in my elec­tric bill, and now I know that the stuff in the freezer stayed frozen for 30 hours. I didn’t lose any food dur­ing the blackout.

  6. Paula Zahn said on April 17th, 2007 at 11:39 am

    I don’t know what’s hap­pen­ing to me, but it seems like the bad news of any given day can always be made worse by the cov­er­age of the bad news.

    You just don’t appre­ci­ate good cov­er­age! And perky! Very perky!

    (Okay…it’s really Marcia.)

  7. Marcia said on April 17th, 2007 at 11:42 am

    I’m in a deep funk. Not only does the world suck, but I was writ­ing a brief sen­tence about the shoot­ings for my blog, and I image-googled Vir­ginia Tech, and the first two images that popped right up were porno­graphic, and it hit me, again, that my kids have to come across this shit all the time.

    What kind of world are we leav­ing the chiiilllllldren?

    Okay, I’m not really that dra­matic. Really, though, I’m depressed.

  8. nancy said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    It’s not even the perk­i­ness that bugs me. It’s the con­stant, non-stop need to yam­mer that these wall-to-wall-coverage news events inspire. I always want to say, “You have the pic­tures. Let THEM talk.” But no, we have to have crim­i­nol­o­gists and grief coun­selors and expert this and eye­wit­ness that to spew bull­shit into the ether. It dri­ves me nuts, espe­cially in the very ear­li­est hours, when we don’t know much. Why can’t CNN say, “We don’t know much”? Why find some crim­i­nol­o­gist to spec­u­late on what might have hap­pened? Why not pull peo­ple off the street in Atlanta to spec­u­late? It’s worth about as much.

  9. ashley said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Mar­cia, come on down! Over half of the peo­ple I know that cur­rently live in New Orleans are on anti-depressants. I’m a well­butrin man myself, and da wife is happy with lexapro.

  10. Marcia said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    Ash­ley, I’m a Zoloft girl, myself. And I haven’t been in what I call the pit for a long time, but man. This world’ll do it to ya.

    I hear you, Nancy.

  11. Sue said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    Grew up with winds blow­ing off Lake Supe­rior.
    Now it’s been 20 years of liv­ing in “climate-controlled” San Diego. Here we have the Santa Ana winds. Ray­mond Chan­dler said it best:

    There was a desert wind blow­ing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the moun­tain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek lit­tle wives feel the edge of the carv­ing knife and study their hus­bands’ necks. Any­thing can hap­pen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cock­tail lounge.

    – “Red Wind”

  12. Connie said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    I’m with you about the depres­sion Mar­cia. At least the sun is shin­ing today. Sev­eral of us at work yes­ter­day were ready to drive to what­ever col­lege our chil­dren attend and drag them home for safety. But you know you can’t pro­tect them for­ever, just hope you’ve done a good job of teach­ing them how to keep them­selves safe. Mine being in col­lege in Indi­anapo­lis where the mur­der rate is soar­ing through the roof already makes me nervous.

  13. Ricardo said on April 17th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    My daugh­ter lived in an off cam­pus apart­ment at UC Santa Bar­bara when the angry young man aimed his car at a street­ful of stu­dents and hit the gas. Four dead. See, Isla Vista is one big street party every Fri­day night. My daugh­ter lived in the apart­ment next to the death scene the year before. She had been on the scene just an hour before the inci­dent, a cou­ple of blocks from her new apartment.

    I had some anx­ious time before I was able to talk to her and find out if she was all right. The news told the address and that set me off.

    1. We prob­a­bly all knew of some­one at col­lege that was capa­ble of los­ing con­trol and doing some kind of scary thing. In my col­lege days “Bob” used to fol­low girls home and sit in his hot rod Mus­tang out side their homes for hours and hours.
    2. Euro­peans point to the Amer­i­can ‘cow­boy men­tal­ity’. They will not be able to use their stereo­typ­ing this time, the shooter is a South Korea national.
    3. The blood wasn’t yet dry and the Bush spokesper­son was alread send­ing com­fort­ing mes­sages. To the NRA.

  14. john c. said on April 17th, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    I’m with you on the TV guys, espe­cially Paula, Nancy. I just can’t watch it. I was as guilty as the next reporter when I was young. But I like to think I got bet­ter with time. And I’ve cov­ered my share of tragedies (I spent the days lead­ing up to my wed­ding inter­view­ing fam­ily mem­bers of school chil­dren killed when their bus was hit by a train — a train going 70 miles per hour.) The rule I tried to fol­low was this: the more tragic the event, the more basic the language.

  15. nancy said on April 17th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    Excel­lent rule. Some­times the facts sim­ply speak for them­selves, and any attempt to under­line them just comes off as crass and tasteless.

    It’s a cliché that TV reporters are always stick­ing their mics in vic­tims’ faces and ask­ing how they feel. This hap­pens far less often than you’d think, but hon­estly, I pre­fer it to them telling me how I feel.

  16. ashley said on April 17th, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    Ricardo: my frat house at FSU was actu­ally Ted Bundy’s old apart­ment build­ing. Go fig­ure. Yes, I found out ex post facto.

    Con­nie: “Indi­anapo­lis where the mur­der rate is soar­ing through the roof”. Excuse me. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Sorry.

    Unfor­tu­nately, my buddy Ray has kind of summed up my feel­ings on Blacks­burg.

    And does any­body else have the lyrics to Dirty Laun­dry run­ning through their head?

  17. Dorothy said on April 17th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    Rais­ing a hand here for Effexor. Although mine was pre­scribed for hot flashes, it’s usu­ally used for depres­sion. Per­haps it’s helpigng me in that depart­ment, but I’m not sure. Life’s been mov­ing at a wild speed around me lately and I think I need all the drugs I can get.

    I was diag­nosed with Graves’ Dis­ease last week, and am going with the RAI treat­ment to knock out part or maybe all of my thy­roid. My husband’s had one job inter­view and is fly­ing to Ohio for another on Sun­day. We’re prob­a­bly going to be relo­cat­ing to either Mt. Ver­non, OH or Lynch­burg, VA. It causes me too much sleep­less­ness think­ing about these impend­ing changes.

    As far as the Vir­ginia Tech sit­u­a­tion, I have to hon­estly say I’m not sure how the t.v. anchors/reporters are sup­posed to look, if they aren’t allowed to have sad, fur­rowed brows. I don’t mean to be argu­men­ta­tive, but how else are they going to look on cam­era? They look seri­ous most of the time any­way, and this was an awful, awful thing to hap­pen. Brian Williams on NBC men­tioned he’s the dad of a col­lege stu­dent and could iden­tify with what par­ents were going through. I felt the same way — I could not really get thru the day yes­ter­day until I spoke to my son on OSU’s cam­pus, even though he was hun­dreds of miles away.

    I know it’s trou­bling the way the t.v. media respond to this kind of thing. But it’s here and it’s not going away, and I think it does not do much good to crit­i­cize them. I think ener­gies would be bet­ter directed towards gun con­trol, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m writ­ing my con­gress­man and Senator.

  18. Ray said on April 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    I’m cur­rently self-medicating with a mix of anti­his­t­a­mines, ice cream, and the occa­sional putting of my fist through some inan­i­mate object that looks like it will make a sat­is­fy­ing crunch­ing sound.

  19. Peris said on April 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    Com­mer­cial TV news is for chil­dren, com­plete with pretty pic­tures, catchy titles and theme music. What would Wal­ter Do? is what you should ask (or Chet and David). What we have here is not going away, as long as we keep watch­ing it. For­tu­nately, we now have chan­nels of imme­di­acy other than TV ones.

    Oh, and Sauza is my lit­tle helper – a real wind­breaker on a gusty day!

  20. Connie said on April 17th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    Yes, Ash­ley, of course you win. But all is rel­a­tive, and for Indy it has still been a bad year so far.

  21. Jennifer said on April 17th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    For some unknown rea­son, I watched Paula last night. Boy did she frost my ass. I had to switch the chan­nel after she “sug­gested” what some of the wit­nesses might be try­ing to say. I yelled some­thing about lead­ing the wit­ness and changed the channel.

    Also, I don’t know who it was, but the jour­nal­ist who had the balls to sug­gest the police chief was not show­ing enough emo­tion should have felt the brunt of all the emo­tion he was try­ing to keep in check.

  22. basset said on April 17th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

    Well, if there was ever a time to show emo­tion, this would be it. Some­one, I assume the uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent, stood up there at the memo­r­ial assem­bly today and just read a pre­pared state­ment… surely he had expen­sive advis­ers telling him to do that, but if you ask me he lost cred­i­bil­ity by being a PR robot instead of a human.

    (Couldn’t tell who he was because we were watch­ing al-Jazeera Eng­lish on a lit­tle TV from across the room, their graph­ics are hard to read any­way and I couldn’t make ‘em out at all this time — but he was onstage in a suit and speak­ing before the Pres­i­dent, he must have been some­one important.)

  23. Barb said on April 17th, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    Seat belts rule! Just yes­ter­day, dressed in jam­mys and slip­pers and in full view of the morn­ing com­muters, my hus­band was able to say “this sucks” while look­ing at the remains of his pre­cious SUV. His trip out for a morn­ing cof­fee was inter­rupted by a car which crossed the cen­ter line and came at him head on. The other guy also walked away unharmed thanks to his seat belt and airbag.

  24. czucky Dimes said on April 18th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Who the hell is Dog­house Riley and does any­one take this per­son seri­ously? A total light­weight, not wor­thy of attention.

  25. Marcia said on April 18th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

    Wow, Dorothy, I meant to say I’m sorry about all of your stress. I was too self-absorbed yes­ter­day to actu­ally read what you wrote.

  26. Charlotte A. Weybright said on April 19th, 2007 at 12:17 am

    My, my, my Bob, aren’t you the clever one. Your dis­cus­sion of the West Cen­tral meet­ing is price­less. Sure is strange that with all of your panic about Thieme Drive col­laps­ing, it still hasn’t done so for the past sev­eral years. And, by the way, that issue is entirely sep­a­rate from the flood pro­tec­tion issue. Con­gress just sim­ply hasn’t pro­vided fund­ing yet for the river bank project at the junc­tion of Wash­ing­ton and Thieme. Your state­ment makes it sound like the flood pro­tec­tion issue ties right in to the ero­sion issue. The two are actu­ally quite a dis­tance apart from each other spatially.

    I also think there were prob­a­bly more than “one or two” peo­ple inter­ested in the his­toric nature of Thieme Drive.

    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Appar­ently, you don’t see much beauty in any­thing. Part of what I would like to see is the river bank cleaned up of all the Trees of Heaven and under­brush. I don’t think any­one wants to see that stay­ing around. Oh, and don’t you worry about me tying myself to the weed trees.

    It sounds like you are just one unhappy person.

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