COLUMN: Representing history in news

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98Imagine, for a moment, a city without news --Ea gray, iron city where all things transpire without comment in a discursive vacuum. Someone is shot or killed or both. He might be a friend of yours, a famous man well known to you and others, but nobody is willing to discuss the incident. News has the power to create subjects and mythologies, to organize communities around the printed word or the spoken image. In every sense, news is reproductive, reproducing incidents and their context at the same time, macabre and predictable. News, in a word, conveys a mood which transcends the dull and lurid particularities of murther, mayhem, burning buildings and peachfuzzy gunmen. That mood, or mode, of experiencing news is a strange mixture of participation and alienation, knowing what to expect and not really giving a damn. The ceaseless barrage of bizarrerie in news produces that much-discussed numbing of the polity. Like a drowsy opium addict, we require the most pungent titillations to rouse us from our collective narcolepsy. And even then, we quickly forget. Until we or one of our immediate circle becomes the object of news, as it were, newsworthy. Personalizing the otherwise anonymous is the ultimate excitement; everyone loves to see his name in print. And so following this year's annual Penn student shooting, there was a predictable outcry followed by the usual calls to action. There were angry letters to the editor. Students, parents and faculty exchanged expressions of disbelief. It was concluded: something must be done about student safety. And then there was what they call a "deafening silence," a collective forgetting, or perhaps a more concerted repression. Within a fortnight it was back to business as usual, onto the next item of the agenda. The shooting was treated slightly, sanitized by vain resolution to review, then shelved. The episode went from news to history, thus facilitating quick forgetting. (After all, the one fatality in the March 1 Palestra shooting wasn't even a Penn student.) But the public gaze leaves an indelible inscription on its object; once you have become news, you can no longer look the same way. This is one lesson learned inter alia by John La Bombard, Penn senior and one of four victims of the March 1 shooting. (And thank goodness he was fortunate enough to derive lessons from the incident.) La Bombard became the impersonal object of temporary outrage on campus. The incident within the Blauhaus was shocking precisely because it was so incredible. If a student can be shot whilst studying, then nobody is safe. We have reverted to the pre-political, where anyone can kill anyone. To acknowledge the shooting and its unsettling ramifications would amount to a renunciation of political foundings, of order, stability and taboo. But La Bombard's humor and sportsmanship enabled the University community to sublimate the incident with incredible, almost insulting swiftness. The brevity of the response and the usual administrative dumb-show of reform indeed diminished the gravity of the shooting -- that is, until La Bombard staged a return of the repressed by publishing his confessions. After a month spent digesting the episode, La Bombard reflected publicly in a Daily Pennsylvanian column: "Do I really have to die for anybody to do anything around here?" And this was not mere polemic, but a broader judgement on our endemic apathy, brutally experienced first-hand. Infrequently does the DP publish a piece as honest and searing as La Bombard's. His column selflessly transforms his experience into a metonym for a sorry state of affairs on and around campus. His tone captures a man at odds with representation; news has both validated and vitiated his experience. Toward the end, he asks unhappily, "Why was my life spared?" It seems La Bombard has accepted the symbolic order out of necessity, a space in which anything is possible. He has become an observer of his own experience. To escape this grim vision of nature requires a return to its origins, along with the more pressing question: Why was his life endangered in the first place? We observers can only consider the incident in the language and symbols in which it is encoded, that is, through the medium of news. News makes our history of the present, ephemeral, internalized and potentially intoxicating, but not so for its eerie and numbing sameness. News partitions history into a series of discrete "nows," moments dissociated from time, sustained and soon forgotten and proliferating in endless and self-perpetuating cycles. Events eventually achieve the solemn status of history, a seemingly incontestable ordering of instants in narrative sequence. A collection of fragmented "nows" derives order from chronology and meaning in positioning. And this is why present caprices are constantly rewriting our histories, why the narratives of our past are interrupted by omissions, blots, stolen moments and willful erasures. To perceive history vigilantly and incredulously --Eto keep alive to history's instantaneous unfolding and its constant fragmentation --Eis to compile an accurate archive of our time. As discriminating consumers of the products of news, our job is to remember completely and to construct a selective chronology from scores of specious leads. But there is a danger inherent: when doubt becomes hyperbolical, when incredulousness ossifies into cynicism and becomes, eventually, that impenetrable numbness to news and novelty, even events worth remembering are forgotten before they happen. This is one among the many implications of the March 1 shooting outside the Palestra, and John La Bombard's subsequent voyage through news. No matter how oppressive becomes any regime, and no matter how naturalized any system seems, we have a duty to interrogate reality and its representations, or else truth too will dissolve, like a face etched in the sand at a bend in the river.