The All Disaster Cat Viewing Marathon
Hello to everyone out there in Blog Land;
After taking a couple of weeks off to gather my thoughts a bit, Disaster Cat is back and running. Much of this time period has been spent in front of the TV, watching what could be described as all "All Disaster Cat Viewing Marathon." The real news is starting to remind of an interview I heard once with the director of a documentary channel. He said that his viewer's just can't get enough of what he called "real disaster footage." You know, the stuff where the volcano explodes and eats the volcanologists or the tornado that looks 10 miles wide and eats cities for breakfast....anyway, he said the folks in his newsroom had come up with a name for this sort of footage, they called it "Disaster Porn." In my free time (usually late at night) I tend to watch a lot of this stuff, but I have to agree the name is pretty apt for a lot of it. But its one thing for me to choose to turn off the lights at 3am and watch rivers of fire cascading down mountain sides; its quite another to begin to feel like the evening new broadcast really belongs somewhere between the History Channel and a National Geographic Documentary. And neither is about anything you'd really want to personally experience. I know that some of this is because the 24 hours news channels are able to bring horrible things to our attention at a rate not even imagined 15 years ago.
After hurricane Andrew, I remember that in California we still believed that "the storm in Florida last night was not to bad," to quote my boss; at 9am Pacific Time. Around noon we got the first reports of severe damage and about two in the afternoon I got a frantic call from a friend who had moved to the area just days before the hurricane hit. He couldn't get any communications with his electricity off, could I get someone in California to turn on the news and tell him what was going on where he was? Just a few years later his working phone line would have allowed him to go on-line to read it for himself. And even better computer system might let him stay on line without either phone or electricity; even during storm itself. And, add gadgets like cell phones, fax machine and even video phones for the broadcasters; and it becomes much easier to send news anywhere on earth "at the speed of live" (or so says Fox News, which I can watch here in my home in Ireland).
But, even given the greater speed of disaster reporting, scientists are saying this week that there do seem to be an increasing number of the natural sort going on. They don't say anything about unnatural disasters, though some of things I've seen on live TV lately might qualify. As for disasters of the man-made sort, its hard to tell if there are really more of them, or if they are just getting better press coverage. History is full of the horrific carnage that people are able to inflict on one another in the name of this or that cause, country, belief system or ideal. On the other hand, we have a lot more people on earth than we used to, so even if the patterns of violence are the same as in ages past, there are greater numbers of both perpetrators and penitential victims.
It does seem that the last few weeks have had an particularly large share of both sorts of disaster viewing. When the first two hurricanes hit, I dutifully got read to sit up all night and watch the coverage. But got distracted by the live "living history" of bombings, plane crashes and the Russian school hostages soon took over as center stage viewing. After a few days, I started rationing my viewing time and even stopped reading the internet much. I gather this is a common human response to just too much sadness being thrown at you at once. And since it wasn't really happening in my house, I could just turn it off and go away. But, I aways came back...after all Disaster Cat is curious...she just HAS to know what's going on. A day without at least one news-broadcast is a day without sunshine (and makes for a jumpy, grumpy little kitty).
By the time Ivan roared into life (and between jokes from my husband along the lines of "what do they expect when the name a hurricane IVAN!" I was back to my usual habit of keeping a news channel on the background while I do my artistic work. I managed to watch most the live coverage and was suitably impressed. I thought about what it was like when I lived through hurricane Frederick (which the commentator just had to remind me was almost EXACTLY 25 years before and made it sound like was sometime back in the Dark Ages). When Frederick came through Hattisburg MIssissippi, we were told we would all be fine. In fact, the were evacuating people to where we were, since they just "knew" that a hurricane could not brings serious winds that far inland. Unfortunately some one forgot to tell Fredrick about this and I learned just what eight hours of 90 mile an hour winds sounds like. And what they can do to a medium sized city. Thanks to the space age, scientists are now much better both at predicting storms and admitting to what they don't know. So millions of people were evacuated, in some places just in case. Looking at the film footage of the Alabama coast, I suspect that thousands of lives were saved because of this. Though the loss in property is just impossible to comprehend. At least not from a few news clips.
And then there is all the shows with "Disaster Politics" springing up in the wake of all the freaky weather, floods, tornado's, hurricanes (and even some of the earthquakes and tornado's). Disaster politics is the spin that different news channels, think tanks, politicians and even some scientists try to put on entire of issue of natural disasters and climate change. It can be fun to watch or very tedious. It all depends on who is doing it, how they are doing it and how often they are doing it. For example, some European channels can not even say the word "Global Warming" without throwing in a paragraph about how its all mankind's fault and we must stop using fossil fuels. I'm not saying this isn't true, just that although most climatologists now are agree we are in a warming period, there is tremendous disagreement as to its causes. It got this warm in the Viking Age too, but I don't think it was from the wakes caused by all those long ships. My problem is they always state it exactly as if it is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. US outlets tend to do the opposite. If fossil fuels are mentioned at all, its always followed by "but we know that there are many natural cycles of climate change" or even "there may not really be any climate change we just have better record keeping now." This second type of statement is showing up less frequently as the weather gets weirder. But you still here it sometimes. The result of these strategies are obvious; many people in Europe think that man is totally reasonable for every degree the climate warms and lots of people in the US think that any suggestion that mankind's action could in anyway affect the planet is just one step away from old style communist propaganda; and designed by evil liberals tree-huggers who want everyone to walk to work and junk their SUV's.
The personal opinion of Disaster Cat is that both sides have some good information and need to be looked at. Not to mention that concentrating only on the climate change aspects of the modern industrial age keep people from looking at what other damage they might be causing. There are many reasons to try and find cleaner and more efficient sources of fuel and energy. The average person is more concerned with improving their lifestyle now than climate change somewhere in the future. Playing that that "enlightened" self-interest may accomplish more in the long run. Better designed houses make for lower heating and cooling costs, no matter what system you are using. Clean rivers are more fun to play in or live beside. And less air pollution cuts down on disease and makes cities much nicer places to live. Dealing will all this may slow down global warming, or the earth may just not give a fig and return to the tropical paradise the dinosaurs loved. Or turn around and present New York and London with an Ice Sheet in 20 years. Both things have happened in the past, a lot faster now than was ever realized before.
One thing is for sure, as long as there are TV stations broadcasting and the Internet is still running; if it does happen, we will all get to see it (and the many other Disaster Porn spin-off programs) live and in living color...
Good thing I have 25 kilos of popcorn stashed away, just in case....
Meanwhile, Stay Tuned to this channel for "THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF DISASTER CAT"