A Thirst for Reality

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

10/14/01

 

Opening Words

“The Wild Geese” by Wendell Berry

 

Horseback on Sunday morning

Harvest over, we taste persimmon

And wild grape, sharp sweet

Of summer’s end.  In time’s maze

Over the fall fields, we name names

That went west from here, names

That rest on graves.  We open

A persimmon seed to find the tree

That stands in promise,

Pale, in the seed’s marrow.

Geese appear high over us,

Pass, and the sky closes.  Abandon,

As in love or sleep, holds

Them to their way, clear,

In the ancient faith:  what we need

Is here.  And we pray, not

For new earth or heaven, but to be

Quiet in heart, and in eye

Clear.  What we need is here.

 

Meditation for 10/14/01

Creative Spirit, Spirit of Life

Mirror and messenger

of our need for humility and compassion…

In the throes of an autumn

offering our anxious world

Bursting gold and bursting bombs

We look to find some way to connect the dots

Between what was, what is, and what will be.

 

Since we last gathered together in this hall

Military strikes have stirred up the rubble

Of a region already in pieces,

Raining down a shower of revenge…

Revenge that we want to believe is righteous.

 

Since we last gathered together in this hall,

Blurry images of green light racing

Above a land oceans away

Appeared like fireflies on our television screens,

While our town criers proclaimed the blurry details of a battle plan…

A plan that we want to believe is just.

 

With color-coded graphic instruments of instruction

Experts continue to point out the precision of our power…

As our leaders target the weapons of our wealth
toward a facist regime

Produced in part by a world’s indifference to itself…

An indifference that we want to believe may now become obsolete.

 

Meanwhile the daily ups and downs of our mundane,
extraordinary lives

Continue to have their way with us

Twisting our individual realities

Into ever-changing shapes of joy and sorrow…

Shapes that we want to believe are worthy of our trust.

 

As the natural world continues to hum

its melody of life, death and rebirth.

Let us pause in respect for that song—

A song so easily drowned out by an anxious search for answers…

Answers we want to believe will arrive,

But that we know may never come.

Let us be silent for a time.

 

Life of our shared life,

May we find the courage that comes from our commitment,

A commitment toward increasing our understanding of

That which often seems beyond our comprehension…

That which often leaves us quivering and questioning…

A commitment whose foundation is always compassion…

Compassion for the fragility of our shared lives

Compassion for the fragility of our shared world.

We want to believe…

We want to believe…

Amen.

 

Reading

 

“A First on TV” [for Walter Cronkite] by David Ignatow

 

This is the twentieth century,

You are there, preparing to skin

A human being alive.  Your part

Will be to remain calm

And to participate with the flayer

In his work as you follow his hand,

The slow, delicate way with the knife

Between the skin and flesh,

And see the red meat emerge.

Tiny rivulets of blood will flow

From the naked flesh and over the hands

Of the flayer.  Your eyes will waver

And turn away but turn back to witness

The unprecedented, the incredible,

For you are there

And your part will be to remain calm.

 

You will smash at the screen

With your fist and try to reach

This program on the phone, like a madman

Gripping it by the neck

As if it were the neck of the flayer

And you will scream into the receiver,

“Get me station ZXY at once, at once,

do you hear!”  But your part

will be to remain calm.

 

Sermon

A few Mondays ago, I went to bed at what seemed like a normal hour.  I read for a while, turned out the light and tried to fall asleep.  Upon realizing that sleep would not be coming easily, I turned to tricks I had used at other times of insomnia.  I ended up in front of the television listening to the drone of a shopping channel where the smiley host was declaring the beauty of a faux emerald ring in-between accepting calls from other insomniacs across the nation who wanted to “go on air” with their excitement at having made a  purchase.  For nearly two hours, I continued to watch the channel as they shifted to electronics, dolls, and then back to jewelry.  Desperately wanting to sleep, knowing that I had a busy week ahead, I endured the patter believing that the never-ending, mostly monotone commercial would eventually lull me to sleep.  Just before five am, I gave up and returned to bed, where I finally, mercifully, achieved my goal.  Later that morning, I slept in attempting to make up for my lost hours of slumber. I ignored a phone call around 8:30, believing that it was probably a wrong number.  Susan got up and prepared for work; soon I followed, having risen much later than I had planned.  I quickly readied myself for the day, and drove to church on a beautifully sunny morning.  I was greeted in the parking lot by church member Caroline Adler, who said, “Isn’t it awful?”  “What happened?” I asked.  “Oh, you haven’t heard?”

 

You, of course, know the rest of the story.  I soon took my place with millions of others around the country and the world as we watched televised coverage of a surprising and devastating attack.  On a little black and white television in the church office, I watched as a landmark of the city I called home a few years back fell to the ground. The scenes played over and over throughout the day as though, in our shock and disbelief, we needed to be reminded every minute that the attack had actually occurred.  For days, the coverage expanded with home video and photographs of the same stunning events.  How could this have happened?  What did it all mean? How could our vision of reality be shifted so quickly?

 

Reality continues to be a difficult concept to get a hold of these days.  The reality we shared before September 11^th seems much different than what we are calling reality today.  Here’s a prime example.  Several weeks ago, as I determined the sermon topics for the fall, I envisioned this Sunday as a fine time to explore the American obsession with what has been referred to as “reality television”—the television programming that uses “real life” situations as subject matter.  I, of course, had no idea at the time how ironic that choice would turn out to be.  Though the “reality television” format has been often utilized for documentaries of many kinds, the current trend I’m describing has been to put “ordinary” people in extraordinary circumstances and to film what ensues.  The broadcast result is most typically a highly-edited, music-accompanied montage of human behavior that betrays reality at the very moment it claims to be reality, because it features isolated moments of life that have been spliced together to form a tidy package of emotions and actions without adequate representation of the events on either side of those moments.  The lives of the people whose narcissistic tendencies have drawn them into being filmed for these programs are then mangled into shapes that fit the desires of producers and the advertisers they court.  More importance is placed upon how someone looks in front of the camera than on who the person is and what values she holds.  The primary questions asked by the creators of these shows are “What story do viewers most want to hear?”  and “How can the raw footage of reality be transformed into a narrative that compels people to watch long enough to stick around for the commercials?”  As a result the stars of these “reality” programs are exploited at the very moment that our media-crazed culture wants them to believe that they are achieving their greatest success.  Reality television therefore aims to entertain by providing a playground for a culture obsessed with celebrity, a culture willing to parcel out five minutes of fame to those who push the hardest to get them, a culture that disregards the actual content of people’s lives while placing an increased emphasis on the ephemeral rewards of being recognized. When a homemaker from Tennessee can become a television star by allowing herself to be filmed living in Australia with strangers, then each of us has a chance to become larger than life and to have our own individual proclivities appear noteworthy and newsworthy.  We too can take our place alongside Jennifer Lopez, Brittany Spears, Tom Cruise, and Madonna.  After all, don’t the inalienable rights of humanity include life, liberty and the pursuit of fame?

 

 Back on September 3^rd, the Des Moines Register devoted a couple of pages to the coming onslaught of these kinds of shows, with a headline that now seems eerie and omniscient: “Reality bites chunk out of fall TV.”  The article featured descriptions of the thirty-plus “reality” programs that would soon be available to viewers, shows that included the third installment of “Survivor” the second installment of “Temptation Island” and a variety of new series that would showcase “ordinary” people willing to expose themselves to a national audience.  Perhaps nothing else so epitomizes the innocence that our nation lost last month than the preponderance of these reality shows, now being broadcast during a time when the term “reality” has taken on new meaning.  Who cares about the frivolous pursuits of these folks when we are in the midst of a world turned upside-down?  

 

But then again, maybe a little dabble in old-fashioned reality is not such a bad thing after all…particularly when the most abundant alternative has been 24-hour news coverage with breaking stories and summations of the day’s events crawling into our lives along the bottom of the screen…quick blurbs describing the dangers of Anthrax as though each of us has already been infected, angry protests against our country as though the world community is ganging up on us, Al-Qaeda bastardizations of the term “jihad” as though Islamic law contains specific vocabulary for terrorism, and edited down jingoistic declarations of United States superiority by a president seemingly confined to a vocabulary well-suited for a Texas barbeque, but mostly inadequate for a complex world crisis. Does our president and his advisors really believe that we can “rid the world of evil-doers,” as though evil is a pest that simply requires extermination? Albert Camus wrote, “Every society has the criminals it deserves.” If we are really going to try to root out evil, we have to take a full view of the systemic causes, not just the systemic reactions. Declaring that our continued response to September 11^th is a crusade of good vs. evil is an over-simplification that does not seem based in reality. 

 

So what is reality in these troubled times? Along with many of you, I find it difficult to determine what I need to know to define reality in the midst of all this chaos.  How much of this barrage of information do I really need?  I confess I feel compelled to watch at least part of the televised coverage each night because the images I see are a window into the psyche of a nation that, because of its wealth and influence, will play a decisive role in the future of our world.  However, I find it important to remember that the televised coverage, particularly that of American television, is only part of the story.  Much like the producers of the kind of “reality” television I described earlier, the networks do their best to package isolated moments of a world’s experience of pain and hope into video clips and sound bites, complete with slow-motion replays, catchy screen titles, and mood music.  And every ten minutes or so, there is a break for advertising….  By shrinking the stories of a world in crisis into these pre-set molds, the TV news networks are restricted by their medium to inevitably over-simplify complex issues at the same time they claim to be feeding us the “news we need.”  The information presented by the bulk of our national media, driven by an anxiety that continues to feed upon itself, clearly does not represent reality.  How could it when we have Tom Brokaw, a well-respected national news anchor, declaring that when his office received an Anthrax-laced letter it was the “ultimate nightmare”?[1]  Unfortunate, yes.  Disconcerting, yes.  Frightening, you bet.  But an “ultimate nightmare?”  As the Anthrax scare has reached the offices of major television networks, insuring that anxiety will continue to color the way the stories are being conveyed, we would do well to try to filter the messages we are being fed, messages filled with superlatives and hyperbole as though the people bringing us the stories are as important as the stories themselves. I am not suggesting that we simply ignore what is happening in the world, that we hunker down in our Midwestern bunker of safety until we too are the direct victims of an attack.  But I do think that we should limit our exposure to this televised anxiety.  John Phelan, author of the book Mediaworld: Programming the Public, provided a caution during more peaceful times that seems pertinent today:  if we become too immersed in “news” we will “deaden…[our] sensitivity not only to the world, but to…[our] own experience.  Whatever the class or age or level of education, one becomes a member of the mass whenever one seeks a mindless connection to concocted propaganda for the head or contrived pornography for the heart.  Addiction is the essence of the mass culture experience.”[2]  It is this addictive “mass culture experience” that we should be questioning, particularly in these complex times.

 

In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurhman writes, “Too much mass media tends to have a narcotizing effect on society.”  This numbing effect is evidenced by the fact that viewers are being hypnotized by an over-anxious, fear-mongering media to purchase useless gas masks and unnecessary antibiotics. While the current events of our world may inevitably lead us to more readily ingest the messages of mass media, we might be better served by questioning the images we see and the perspectives we hear.  Wurhman encourages viewers to ask the following questions when watching the news:

“•Why did the newscaster choose the particular details of the story?

•What do the numbers mean?

•What is it the announcer isn’t telling me?

•Why is this story more important than another?

•And the most crucial question, how does this story apply to my life?”

Wurhman contends that by this kind of “conscientious questioning of what…[we] see, hear, and read,…[we] can make material release information it might ordinarily conceal.  Through this questioning,…[we] can begin to see events in context, which is the only way they can be of value.”[3]

 

By sharing these pointers, I may not be conveying anything new to this gathered community, a group of people who have made a religious pursuit out of their willingness to question.  However, with the onslaught of information now blaring at us from all angles, it is good to be reminded of our need for a dose of reality, the reality that emerges when we engage with the world on our own terms, not denying what we find, but placing the shared facts of our living in the proper context. 

 

I reiterate that, in many ways, the shift in reality that many of us have experienced is one that probably needed to happen. Not that thousands of innocent people needed to die, but that our national obsession with life’s minutiae was bound to come to an end at some point.  I share now portions of a column that was run this week in the biting, satirical paper The Onion that jabs at our country’s previous addiction to nonsense and how things may now be, mercifully, different:

 

“Shaken by the tragic events of Sept. 11, people across the nation have abandoned such inconsequential concerns as the Gary Condit scandal and Britney Spears' skimpy outfit at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards. No longer are they talking about shark attacks or what's-his-name, that Little Leaguer who was too old to play. Instead, they're focusing on the truly important things in life: friends, family, and being good to one another.

How long can it go on like this?

…weeks after the horrific attacks that claimed more than 6,000 lives, many Americans are wondering when their priorities will finally be in the wrong place again. Some are wondering if their priorities will ever be in the wrong place again.

In the aftermath of this horrible tragedy, people find themselves cruelly preoccupied with the happiness and well-being of their loved ones, unconcerned with such stupid…[stuff like] the new Anne Heche biography or Michael Jackson's dramatic comeback bid….Who knows how long it will be before things are back to normal?"[4]

 

The way we view reality has changed.  For many of us life does seem more harsh, more fragile, more worthy of our attention and our devotion.  But maybe this is a reality-shift that was long overdue.  The current world chaos is providing an instructive challenge to all of us—a  challenge to see our commitments expand beyond our own self-interest and material wealth…a challenge to see our community expand beyond the confines of our own country and national pride.  Any crisis is a time of opportunity.  May our country take this opportunity to share in the discovery described in the October 1^st installment of Doonsebury, where Boopsie declares “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe it.  I no longer care what Madonna had for breakfast!”  To which her husband responds, “Welcome back.”

Welcome back, indeed.  Reality has been waiting for us.