Recently I became addicted to Sudoku. You know, the grid where every row, column and square must contain the numbers 1 to 9 without repetition.
The media slobbered over Sudoku like it was the second coming of Calvin and Hobbes. Every paper from The New York Times to USA Today attempted to make sense of this numerical phenomenon. I like the explanation in London's The Independent the best. "You just look at groups of numbers and work out what's missing," said Edward Billig, the Independent Sudoku grand master for 2005.
Other Sudoku analyses were more cerebral. The Washington Post's John Kelly "traveled by oxcart" to the Sudoku Dojo in rural Japan, where he "watched Sudoku masters at work." Will Shortz, the puzzle editor of The New York Times, analyzed the philosophy behind Sudoku. We like Sudoku, he mused, because "as humans we seem to have a innate desire to fill up empty spaces."
So do newspaper editors. But the puzzle page is not the only part of the paper where newspapers are following Sudoku's logic.
After the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, the media practically abandoned their coverage of the growing movement against the war in Iraq. Between Aug. 11 and 18, the war in Iraq was mentioned 146 times in The New York Times. Between Sept. 11 and 18, the number dropped to 39. On Aug. 5, CNN mentioned Iraq 20 times. A month later, it fell to 12. You just look at groups of numbers and work out what's missing.
We could, of course, look at a different set of numbers. Rising gas prices, the military casualties in Iraq, the Louisiana national guardsmen stationed in Baghdad -- take your pick. But all of these numbers logically point us to what's missing in this puzzle.
Where are the massive protests? Where are the front-page stories continuing the momentum started in August by Cindy Sheehan? Why are we giving money to Halliburton to rebuild New Orleans when national guardsmen stationed in Iraq don't even have simple body armor?
It doesn't take a Sudoku wizard to see that the media are not linking all of the boxes together for the American public. We need the repeated news coverage that was present at the end of August, when Cindy Sheehan mobilized supporters during her protest outside President Bush's ranch. On Aug. 16, the San Francisco Chronicle said that her protest "could be the catalytic event that might help build a significant movement against the war."
But the media storm surrounding Sheehan passed as soon as the winds of the hurricane started picking up. And to displace coverage of one disaster for another is doing a disservice to the men and women who are still overseas, waiting to come home.
College junior Emily Buzzell has a brother-in-law stationed in Iraq. She is not happy with the slowing momentum of the movement she feels was picking up just as Katrina coverage started. "Frequently [the media] reports total casualties, but it usually buries the information on page A20 of the newspaper behind sensationalist stories," she says. "Only when the media ... continues to follow Cindy Sheehan's plight and seriously calls into question the war will we be able to bring our soldiers home and prevent any more pointless killing."
Student organizers at Penn agree that more attention should be paid to Iraq. College senior Katrina Jurn is organizing busloads of Penn students who will travel to an antiwar march in Washington this Saturday. Jurn hopes that the movement will regain momentum in the coming weeks. "We want to reawaken on campus a sense of urgency in the kinds of discussions we have about U.S. involvement" in the war, she said.
But the talk lately on Penn's campus hasn't been about the war in Iraq. We're too busy doing our Sudokus.
It's time to take the logic of Sudoku and add up what's going on around us. Part of the appeal of Sudoku is the fact that the actual puzzle is relatively easy to master, even though the solution is complex. In his analysis of Sudoku, Will Shortz said, "If you make a mistake ... and then base other reasoning on that mistake, it is practically impossible to localize the problem and undo it. You have to erase the entire puzzle and start over, which can be frustrating."
The war in Iraq is a diabolical puzzle -- and we can't start over. The solution will be inelegant, but unless we devote more than 15 minutes to this conundrum, the numbers of atrocities will continue to add up.Melody Joy Kramer is a senior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.
