Now that tropical storm Irene has passed over, scaring the bejeeses out of the media but apparently not spooking too many other people, can we see something on the news besides vistas of empty beaches and that abiding favorite, spots-of-water-on-the-lens?
Face it, "Hurricane" Irene was a bust, despite the way the media hyped it.
On TV, we got three days of the local weather -- for the mid-Atlantic region. How very provincial. I mean really provincial. All the crap weather we've had in the rest of the country, and the local TV news everywhere still found a bunch of other stuff to talk about. Iowa was embroiled in all kinds of politics, for example. Yeah, in this one-horse segment of the nation. Imagine that.
The whole Midwest had what amounted to a land-based hurricane sitting over five or six states, from Kansas to Ohio, Minnesota to Arkansas, for the entire first half of this summer. Winds were, periodically, worse than what Irene was spinning. Unpredictable and very violent storms. The national media did mention the worst of the tornados. I mean, who can resist a scene of absolute devastation, where your kid's swimming pool ends up somehow in a neighboring county? Who cares about the rest? Texas is fried. Have the temperatures there fallen below 100 degrees yet? Who knows? And who cares? This is all the "fly-over zone" after all. The only thing that matters is what happens in NYC or LA. Right?
Pretty sorry that the national media can't seem to penetrate any further into the USA than the coastlines.
Even if Irene wimped out at the end, the media did its best to blow it up into something the dimension of Krakatoa or Mt. Pinatubo. Let's pretend the East Coast is more important than the rest of the country. Or the rest of the world, for that matter.
Legends in their own minds?
"Well, XX% of the population lives on the Eastern seaboard." "This is a 'historic' storm." I'm not quite convinced of that. I'm sure they've seen much worse. I've seen much worse. One visit to Virginia, there was a hurricane off the coast and I never knew it until I heard someone chatting about it at a souvenir shop in Yorktown. In North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey, many residents appeared to be skateboarding on the seawalls or strolling calmly on the barrier beaches, scarves flapping in the wind. Others probably breaking into stores and cars, even as Irene was whipping up the waves.
OK. It's over. So can we move on?
Sick and tired of it. Do we really need to hear about the repair of each and every downed power line in the Pine Barrens or Upstate New York? The media even pretty much snubbed Boston.
Our "big blow" in northern Illinois was more than a month ago, and on the forested lots, there are still fallen trees stacked up like fire wood, which I suppose it will be, if and when the county gets around to picking it up. Send a news crew! OMG, we had a storm! Who would ever suspected such a thing might happen?
But wait! They still have six more East Coast governors to interview and applaud for listening to the weather reports. Yeah, quite an accomplishment for a politician, no?
I suppose next January, we'll have to sit through a series of man-on-the-street interviews about how dreadfully hot it is in Florida. Yeah. We know.
How about something that concerns the rest of us?
Save the Republic.
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