popular culture

An RD holiday sampler of stories & viewpoints we would have liked to read in 2012.

RD talks to Mark Van Stone, author of 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, who claims that the real lesson of the Maya is that they showed us how to destroy a civilization by stupidly using up their environment and by not planning for a bad year.

The far left and the far right agree on many things: mainstream politics doesn’t matter, hidden forces control our destiny, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is about to end.

I knew something horrific had happened just from my friend Lisa’s email: “R U watching the news?” When you report on violence, when your family has been pierced by violence, people assume you are interested in violence. And you are. Very.

We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future.

In Monterrey, where Jenni had just performed what was to be her final concert, fans processed the streets carrying candles and images of her, just as in the religious processions that have occurred throughout Latin America since the arrival of the Spanish over five hundred years ago. From Mexico to California, shrines in her honor have surfaced in neighborhoods and lawns.

Without the framing device of community, without any context in which to shape the interpretation of the events, such images become simply sensational, the prick of pain without the moral payoff.

We rely on a journalist to just stand by—it’s a practical act of witness: while you report the story you stand in the presence, neither blinking nor stepping up.

Is it simply a part of the conflicted role of the journalist or does the photo’s work as cultural catharsis ignore the specific agony of the victim’s loved ones?

After the emotion evoked by the film subsides, sober consideration begins here: why, in the supposedly “post-racial” age of Obama, is there no space in movies to imagine the historical story of African Americans creating the conditions of their own emancipation?