Charity overwhelmed by sensationalism

Monday, October 6, 1997

Charity overwhelmed by sensationalism

ALTRUISM: A freeway incident sparks thoughts on time not well
spent

I write this having just witnessed something rather spectacular.
I use the word "spectacular" not in the sense to which we have of
late grown accustomed. That is to say, not in the "fatality-liable
football player/back-biting sportscaster/princess in a car crash"
media scrum sense of the spectacular, but in a – to use former
President George Bush’s speechwriter’s phrase – kinder, gentler
sense.

I was driving south on Cahuenga Boulevard where it parallels the
Hollywood Freeway, and noticed through the chain-link fence
dividing the two that southbound traffic had come to a standstill.
Certainly, this particular case of freeway paralysis would not be
considered unusual but for its cause; alone, a mean-assed-looking
pit bull had decided to go for a stroll in the No. 3 lane.

I will digress here to say that I have a certain affinity for
dogs. I’ll go so far as to characterize it as an advanced degree of
innate simpatico. That’s not to say that I don’t like cats; I do.
But I don’t get cats. I get dogs. I write poems about them. I dream
of them. I laugh with them. And while others may be so bold as to
suggest that in their past lives they were members of royalty or
other such holders of lofty title – notice how no one ever claims
to have been a rodent or an IRS agent in their past incarnations –
I will contentedly submit that in my previous visits to this plane
of existence, I was a dog. (Having said that, I suppose a
disclaimer is in order: I don’t struggle with the temptation to
engage in some of their more noteworthy behavioral proclivities,
like peeing in public, leg humping, and lying around all day
licking one’s own crotch, but, hey, the day ain’t over yet.)

Anyway, I saw this dumb dog on the freeway and decided, at great
risk to my vehicle and person, to go to its rescue. I pulled over,
got out of my car, sprinted through traffic, and arrived at the
edge of the freeway to find that I was not alone. About five other
motorists had done the same and were in the process of directing a
chorus of whistling, thigh-slapping, and kissing noises in the
general direction of the dog. He was as interested in us as I was
in having to explain to friends and family how I lost half of my
fingers in an altercation with a dog in the middle of the freeway.
So with caution, we pursued the pooch, hoping he might get off at
Highland, Vine or even Gower.

Then, a clever motorist tried a different approach. He drove up
to the dog, opened his passenger door and slapped the seat twice.
The dog, recognizing the international canine signal for "Come on,
let’s go," jumped into the car and sat down on the seat as though
it was his owner’s car parked in his owner’s driveway. I’ll never
forget what happened next. People cheered. Not just those of us who
were on foot, but people in their cars as well. A few clapped.
Everyone grinned. It was surreal.

Then the spell broke, as it is apt to do, and the freeway got
back to its business of conveying anonymous, insulated clusters of
people from point A to point B. A thousand-car traffic jam
proceeded to unwind itself as we all went into warm-and-fuzzy mode
for being such a compassionate lot. How nice.

Back in my car, the warm-and-fuzzy became cold-and-harsh when I
wondered what the outcome of this whole slice-of-life episode would
have been were it a human instead of a nice doggie roaming around
on the freeway. And not a kindly Alzheimer’s patient on his way to
vote for Harry Truman, but a 20-year-old crud-streaked, homeless
crackhead. Would we have jumped from our cars to intervene on his
or her behalf?

It occurred to me that I had been willing and prepared to expose
myself to an obviously not-too-smart, 75-pound carnivore with a bad
reputation and enough power in its jaws to screw me up for keeps. I
would have taken it by the collar, put it in my car, and given it
to its owner along with a piece of my mind. But would I put a
dirty, stinking, deranged, and probably-on-the-verge-of-puking
human in my car? I don’t know. I can’t say. But I do find it
interesting that I can say "yes" to the dog and only "maybe" to the
human. Nix that. It isn’t interesting – it’s disgusting.

And now for your reading pleasure I will commit the non sequitur
of the week: the death of Princess Diana.

I refer to the grotesque phenomena leading up to and following
her demise; for instance: how the only drunk person in the car was
the designated driver; how suddenly every person on the planet
denied having ever purchased any issue of any publication that ever
printed a paparazzo’s photo; how legitimate, credentialed
photojournalists were being jostled and spat upon in London, the
tabloid capital of the free world; and how Dan Rather, whose stage
presence is the only proven cure for insomnia, didn’t go to Mother
Teresa’s funeral but managed to make it to Diana’s. Why England but
not India? God knows it wasn’t for the food.

I doubt that anyone would disagree that the untimely death of
Diana and her less-acknowledged companions was tragic. Untimely
deaths tend to fall under that category. On the other hand, the
unprecedented hysteria that followed ranged from simply
embarrassing to deeply distressing.

Point 1: A Reuters article reported that her death was the
biggest British news event this century, producing more column
inches than even the most dramatic stages of World War II.

Point 2: The Hollywood Variety reported that TV newsmagazines
aired a whopping 360 segments on Di in the 30 days following the
accident. "Only one day passed during the month without at least
one Princess Di story. That was Sept. 24, of course, when news
producers ignored the princess to focus on details of Marv Albert’s
assault trial."

Point 3: According to Neilson Media Research, at any given time
between the hours of 6 and 8 a.m., 33,252,000 people were watching
the funeral. That’s one out of every eight. That’s pretty close to
the population of Argentina.

On this last point I have tried, without success, to imagine
what 33 million means. To put it in perspective, if you had to
spend a grand every single day it would take you over 90 years to
burn through $33 million. Or think of it as 651 times the
50,000-plus faculty, staff and student population of our
university. But let’s think of it in more practical terms.

What would happen if 33 million of us woke up a little early
tomorrow morning and spent an hour writing our local, state and
federal politicians to remind them about a thing or two? Can you
imagine how our leadership would respond if they received 33
million postcards in Thursday’s mail demanding campaign reform,
term limits, an end to hunger, and a balanced budget? What if 33
million people wrote to the IRS and said they weren’t going to pay
another penny in taxes until it cleaned up its act? What if 33
million of us went out for an hour and picked up garbage, or
planted saplings, or did other good deeds?

Let’s get a little closer to the point. What if 33 million of us
taxpayers (or future taxpayers, as your case may be) wrote the
President and demanded that he outlaw U.S. production of
anti-personnel land mines post haste, and that he bring severe
economic pressure to bear on any country that wouldn’t do the same?
I saved that one for last because the abolishment of land mines was
one of Diana’s most admirable and emergent humanitarian
endeavors.

Thirty-three million. Even if each person only watched for an
hour, it adds up to about 3,800 years of viewing. If one of the
guys building Stonehenge decided to watch TV 24-7 for 30 million
hours, he’d still be watching it. Keep in mind, that was just the
funeral. I almost don’t want to know how many hundreds of millions
of hours were lost to all the other programming relating to Diana’s
death.

We’ve gone berserk. We’ve acted as though we knew her. Well, we
didn’t, at least no more so than we knew any of the other 140,000
people, like Maxine Cerro, who passed away that day. Maxine didn’t
know I existed, nor would I have known she did had I not read her
name in the obituary section of the Los Angeles Times. She was the
mother of four, the grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of
one. Let’s be honest, we didn’t know Diana any more than we knew
Maxine (may I offer my condolences if you happen to have actually
known Maxine). In fact, as much as we might not want to admit it,
we probably had more in common with Maxine than we did with the
Princess of Wales.

Picture this: Seconds before she dies someone asks her, "Diana,
people will devote hundreds of millions of hours of their attention
to your death. Would you rather they spend those hours watching TV
or doing something about the 110 million active land mines planted
around the globe?" Gee, I wonder what she’d say. Wouldn’t it be
great if her death, senseless as it was, motivated people to
advance a cause that has the potential to save hundreds of
thousands (the majority of whom are women and children, if that
means anything to you) from being killed or maimed over the next
decade?

Thirty-three million Americans watching a funeral. Six people
chasing a dog on a freeway. Good intentions, no follow-through.
Maybe it wasn’t such a non sequitur.

Michael Daugherty