Day # 227 Fiddling About

The tale of some Roman historians is that Nero fiddled while the great fire of 69 AD consumed large tracts of Roman real estate.   There are other Roman historians, perhaps with less of an ax to grind, who say that Nero actually rushed to help his fellow Romans, distributing aid from his own coffers.  Regardless of the facts, we are left with the image of Nero fiddling (lyre-ing actually) whilst the conflagration raged around him.

In my more mundane way, I also have to find some pastime while the flames dance about.  It is not all of Rome that is burning, but what is consumed was once of significance to me.  No matter, the flames still flicker, allegorical or not, and to ignore them one must do something.  Hence all of the fiddling.

I recently purchased a fiddle but that is neither here nor there.  Its a metaphor we are torturing here, not innocent violin strings.

Despite my now seven month long boycott of the news media, I am occupying my time around the personal campfire with a collection of news stories written by one of the most curmudgeonly of reporters:  H. L. Mencken.   The past evening I read another of his editorials, which deserves to be noted and quoted.

"Of late every reflective American reader must have noticed the inaccuracy and imbecility of most of the special correspondence issuing from Washington.  In it all the frauds, high and low, who flourish in that town are treated with the utmost gravity, and their cheapest and most venal maneuvers are depicted as masterpieces of statecraft.   Is this bilge ordered by Wall Street?  I doubt it.  Is it demanded by the customers of the papers that print it?  Again I have a doubt.  Far easier and more plausible is the explanation that the Washington correspondents write it willingly and in good faith -- that they are too stupid to penetrate the fraudulencies by which they are surrounded."  

Mencken wrote this for the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1927.  While he bristled his brows and smoked his cigar, he had no idea just how bad the state of American journalism could actually get.  What would he have thought of the talking heads spewing vitriol at one another, so busy scrabbling for the perceived high ground of their agenda that the objective reporting of the news has long since all but vanished?

Mencken was no saint, and he certainly was not without opinions which he delivered with aplomb and a sharp wit.  He also knew that news consisted of the facts, collected and recorded by a diligent reporter and delivered as such to the reader.  Opinions were meant for the editorial page where he reveled in their composition.

So my own Rome burns whilst I read the pithy essays of a great journalist long dead.  I am aware of the irony that at the same time I am boycotting the news of the day.  I feel like I am getting the better end of the bargain, consuming news that is almost eighty-odd years old and still pertinent.