What is it about a dog? What New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik found http://nyr.kr/n2ITT7, that dogs are man’s best friend in large part because life on the farm is better than life in the woods.
Think pioneer days – Kansas, Missouri, Manitoba – scads more wolves than dogs. What was to stop them (the dogs) from running off and joining a pack of wolves? What Farley Mowat, the beloved Canadian writer and conservationist, author of “Never Cry Wolf” http://amzn.to/ofrush (it may not be “true,” exactly, the wolf experts say, but what the hey, it’s a great yarn) brings alive.
Catch a glimpse into the eyes of the stubborn breeds, top of the list, Redbone Coonhounds, that’s right, Thurb, and see into a wolf’s soul. Send a shiver down your spine.
Wolves and men, no parallel lives there. Same with tigers and bears, lions. If I weren’t allergic to housecats, I’d probably have a similar sense about them. Surely I did when Callie, our calico Maine Coon, was alive. She was a wild one, direct line to the jungle.
What do we keep in ourselves that’s wild. Our uncanny sense of when we are being watched. Erich Maria Remarque writes in “All Quiet on the Western Front” http://bit.ly/pGKNBN, that if front-line soldiers under fire didn’t have a nth sense then there wouldn’t have been a single survivor left to tell the tale. It’s untested, but anecdotally, far and away more women sensed the 5.8 Richter Scale earthquake that rumbled through New York City this month. A holdover from the cave, women are hyperalert to threats to the flesh of their flesh. How do we know that someone is staring at us from behind? When I was young, my mother used to say when I’d feel a shiver that she was told that a person in the future had stepped on my grave. That always creeped me out, but part of me still believes it. We are wild and pagan, certainly deep down; it has not been bred out. Perhaps it can’t be.
Then a week later, Irene. The Return of Thurb! Delayed until today (Monday, Aug. 29), a blog post interrupted by a hurricane taking its sweet time wreaking havoc, hardly ever causing the interruption of previously scheduled programming, and, sure, the media did a good job of reporting and then exhorting recalcitrant citizens to leave flood-prone areas, the best of them showing hand-held electronic images of that indelible watery disaster, Katrina, when the poor and the uninformed and the sick and the old and the just plain stubborn refused to evacuate, and then were left to swim or rooftop-scream for their lives as the waters kept rising, or how about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, whole blocks of humans submerged and carried away by rushing waters.
What does it take for you to believe that this should be worth your shaking yourself out of your normal routines? Hats off to these broadcast reporters, part of the team of pre-disaster responders who made it possible for millions of people to get to safety. Homes can be repaired. But souls .¤.¤.
Where, though, once the danger is past, or can reasonably be seen to have diminished, is the equivocation? How likely is such a report, a consistent, reliable, publicly responsible report that would fly in the face of the previous evidence that is preparing us for only one thing – a direct hit on New York Harbor, winds gusting to a devastating near-80 mph, pushing storm surge waters, dangerously high, up the Hudson, where landfill residents of Battery Park City have been evacuated. Expect rushing water on the streets of lower Manhattan as never before. More after the break.
Prepare for the worst but hope for the best, Mayor Bloomberg says. But with no equivocating state media, one free from ratings pressure, private newscasts keep pushing the worst, never balancing with the more likely, running with the angle that Irene is losing steam, with new facts yielding a decidedly different outcome. How do you keep people watching, and advertisers happy, if at one point you declare a state of emergency, the next a state of rapt attention .¤.¤.
Of course to follow the story, track the unexpected, would require real budgets, so we would not have the same disaster report over and over again, scripted for those who live in a 50-block radius around Rock Center. But rather would provide a real public service that such an event deserves, controlling for bias against sensationalism, not just kowtowing to the urbane well-to-do.
Case in point: that hurricanes often present much worse flooding from fresh water sources than from the dreaded but overreported “storm surge” of oceanfront property (read: media elite bias). And who lives along these fresh waters (Catskills, Vermont, lower Westchester County, Staten Island, New Jersey lowlands) but the poor and the vanishing middle class who would do well to track other reliable sources for news, if they can find them, than the clarion call of the tail-chasing, mogul-deferring broadcast networks .¤.¤.
Next: Running for Your Life: Discovering Derek Parfit
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