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By Root 1204 0

ones who are abducted and killed because we are scared of it, and that makes us interested in it. We need to take that experience seriously, but also to remember that the news itself is a little mythic, a little false, edited down to what catches our attention. We need to notice which stories catch our attention. We need to let ourselves feel things, but not be unaware of how symbolic the whole thing is. Imagine a button you push and the world for a mile around you goes dark except for anything that could pose a safety threat, and the threats glow green. Some people would almost never push the button. Some people would push it a lot. Some people would tape it down and live in a world made only of darkness and threats. That person thinks herself or himself cautious, but has made a choice to live in a terrible world. Why would anyone do that? Because while you are actively evading dangers, you don’t have anxiety. Anxiety is what you feel when you are trying to be normal on the outside while your emotions roil within. Once we are screaming at the top of our lungs, we are no longer anxious. Likewise a gaggle of worries is a relief in comparison to fear of “whatever it is that is coming next,” which is what we should be afraid of, and about which we can do nothing.

It is hard to know how to feel about ourselves as part of the news audience and, occasionally, as the object of its attenton. It is not all bad and it is not all good. The worst part of it is that it uses real people, who have to bear becoming public curiosities and caricatures, at a time in their lives that is often surreal in its misery. The best part of the way our news works is that sometimes people respond to what they learn and make the world better. Apart from the worst and the best, there is the way, for better or worse, the news gets used by most people, most of the time. We broadcast sad stories, and some reunions; death and a few revivals. When people need to meet in the streets over it, something in that is central to political identity, spirituality, and to theater. It is how we discover that we have a common heart.

20

Weddings, Sports,

Pop Culture, and Parades

There are important similarities between the roles of Demeter, and Mother Mary, and the TV news’s “mother of the missing child.” People need community events—for both psychic and political well-being. I want here to stress that sometimes the culture’s central generative story is connected to a community’s big gatherings. In today’s culture, story and gatherings are not often in sync. We are worried about bombs and disease, but at holidays like Thanksgiving or Labor Day there is no room for the expression of dark emotions. Even Memorial Day, despite the name, is all hot dogs and hamburgers to most of us. Certainly the public mourning of someone we all knew (and none of us knew personally) is one of the most direct ways that we connect our story to community events. The ritual of mourning for famous people is a rare moment when our most powerful stories intersect with a sizable gathering, and it comes to hold a lot of communal emotions.

Mourning rituals are not the only way we moderns come together and share. In our culture, most of us expect to be the center of one gala party that may cost about a year’s rent: the wedding. Gala weddings are a performance of abundance: a dream world of food, sometimes displayed as if to make us think of Eden, heaven, Israel, and the Land of Cockaigne. It is not just that the food doesn’t run out; it is that the display is almost transporting: the wealth of carved meats, exotic stations for vodka and caviar, food sculptures, chocolate fountains, and mountains of pastries. Note that it is generally only the first wedding that deals in this kind of fantasy. Think about the food abundance here, what it means to the eye and mouth, and the promises that are being made about love and happiness. The cornucopian food helps us suspend our disbelief, creates magic that outshines statistics. Second marriages cannot claim the same perfection (given our ideas about what