The News: Living in the Present Tense

By Roger Rosenblatt

Jersey Mother Held in Drowning of Two of Four Missing Children and Reagan Signs Bill to Pay U.S. Farmers Not to Produce Milk. No children. No milk. Nothing connects these items but the newspaper page on which both appear, and the reader's mind, ravenous as Pac-Man, prepared to bite off more than it can chew. In the evening, on television, more stories pile up. Gasoline Leaks Threaten Water Supplies and Sullivan is Electrocuted Despite Pope's Pleas. No water. No Sullivan. No visa: The Reagan Administration Rejects Visa Application from Nicaragua's Interior Minister. So goes the news on an ordinary day, a strange assembly that swoops down on one's life like cousins from Oslo one has never seen before, will never see again, and who, between planes, thought they would call to say hello.

When the day dissolves, little if anything will be remembered of these things. What was it again that Reagan did to the milk? The Jersey mother was said to have "placed" her two little boys in water about six to eight feet deep. The investigation showed that "there appeared to be gasping." One may hold on to those images for a while, along with the reference to the mother fishing out one child by the heel, then placing him back in the river. But eventually it will all spill together--milk, gasoline and water. Two days hence will find the Syrians saying something and the Soviets saying something and Asia will be overrun by the Cabbage Patch dolls. Why does it feel necessary to grasp this information? All the music and poetry in the world, and the mind hungers for news of the Interior Minister of Nicaragua?

Of course, the choice is not that stark; one has one's music and the Cabbage Patch too. Yet it is the news of the day that occupies most of the time, filling the hours as suddenly as helium. We may be wary of the press, but we are crazy for the news. Why? To stave off boredom, provide relief from self-absorption? There we sit, behind the page, before the television screen, nestled in the assumption that anything new must be valuable.

T.S. Eliot thought otherwise: "Evening quickens faintly in the street,/ Wakening the appetites/ of life in some/ And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript." Yet if the news is so deadening, why does it feel like a resuscitation, a thump on the chest to get the day on beat? Merely the expectation of the morning bulletins seems to place the body on alert. No, it is not beauty, wisdom or deep knowledge, but it is the news, a million panicked animals bounding up the stairs. The blood, the senses, everything races.

Ever take a holiday where the papers could not reach you and no TV or radio for miles? It can be done; there is life without journalism. Wild flowers, geese, that sort of life. As long as one remains stock-still, one feels no craving for the networks. But catch one inkling of motion elsewhere, and immediately the mind is overwhelmed with the desire to know all that is happening, in every alley and closet in the world. Such dependency may be a sign of weakness, but it also suggests that life is connected and continuous. The odd present tense the news employs--Reagan Signs Bill. Even as one learns of the fact, Reagan is signing the bill in an eternal present. Maybe that also accounts for the appetite for news: the news permitting people to live in the present.

Or maybe people simply want to know that other people are around. Not that one really doubts it, there being such constant frantic evidence that people are around. Only why does it feel so still sometimes? And why are we, in our lucky normality, able to know something of the desperation of the Jersey mother, standing by the river emptyhanded? The day opens and closes with the reassuring noises of the species, and we seem taken with the news that we are here. --By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.