Screen
Alleva, Richard
THE McCONNELL QUAKES THE ELECTRONIC HEARTH BLAZES onday, January 17, 1994, 4:32 a.m. The McConnell, back late Sunday night from an exhausting New York meeting of the National Book Critics...
...It's a welcome palliative to anxiety: as long as the broadcast is on you know, at least, that L. A. hasn't been swallowed whole...
...we can go to the cellar, stock up on canned soup, do whatever we can do to at least try to make it through...
...So is the sudden pain in my chest, or the inexplicable numbness in your left hand, or the tingle in your scalp as you look into her eyes and realize she doesn't love you anymore...
...they're subsumed into the realm of human discourse...
...Maybe...
...The medium has taken a bad, and often deserved, rap for turning "history" into "entertainment...
...the McC becomes angry...
...The McConnell, back late Sunday night from an exhausting New York meeting of the National Book Critics Circle, is sleeping soundly, dreaming—he hopes—of Audrey Hepburn...
...And it's why, no kidding, "I" became to a certain extent "the McConnell" on the morning of January 17—as did, with different agnominations, most of the inhabitants of Southern California: including the very people like the good Shockneck who were covering the quake even while they were in the midst of its chaos...
...I said before that quakes are a form of ridicule because they are unpredictable...
...And at such moments we become objective to ourselves, as in: Damn...
...But a quake is like a unmotivated slap in the face, like what Abram must have felt when Yaweh, for no special reason, called him by name...
...Lompoc is 150 miles from L.A...
...Run to the phone, of course, to see if all the loved ones are okay...
...But there is, really, a world of difference between this coverage and, say, the "reenactments" of "Hard Copy" or the endless sniggerings over Michael Jackson or Tonya Harding or the Bobbitts...
...snorts the McC, "the pornography of catastrophe," and huffs back to the kitchen, not this time for coffee...
...Unless, as with 18 MEDIA the quake, you're close to but too far from people you love who are in a disaster zone and you're worried sick because the aftershocks keep coming...
...Who you gonna call...
...It may not be McLuhan's idyllic global village, but it is something like the small-town thing where, when your house is struck by lightning, the neighbors come by just to let you know they're there...
...Then there's nothing numbing about the Tube at all...
...At 9:15 a.m., finding himself being groomed by an adoring half-Siamese kitten, he comes to full—such as it is—consciousness...
...There are worse things the centrally human act of communication can do...
...The e-mail is down, and so is the Infonet...
...frank mcconnell 19...
...Some guy has been trapped in his car in a collapsed parking garage, his legs crushed...
...What the McC would have done he chooses not to examine...
...Humans are wonderful: The guy comes on the Tube saying it's a serious emergency and we should all keep the lines clear, and what do folks do...
...His wife Celeste starts up in bed, says "Earthquake...
...And only then had she awakened Dolores to tell her what had happened...
...There's a serious reason for this obtrusively third-person narration, by the way: bear with me...
...So what do you do...
...At 2:45 p.m...
...The McC, after ten years in the state, does not...
...You watch TV...
...the phone lines to L.A...
...Warning...
...The One Thing Needful right now is coffee...
...Oh, yeah: during his NYC junket, Celeste had had her mother come up to stay with her in Lompoc...
...Celeste, being like most wives more there than their husbands, had, feeling the faint tremor at 4:32, called her dad in Agoura to ascertain that he was still— well—alive, and he was...
...So the phones are down...
...So then, since we are essentially (Aristotle and Aquinas both missed this one, though Nietzsche came close) the storytelling animal, what we do is, we make up another story to fight back from the third-person to the first-person narration of our lives...
...and Agoura is in L. A.: did somebody say something about a quake...
...And as they're about to make it, KNBC does a phone interview with "Doctor Bruce," some M.D...
...To experience a quake is to understand Genesis, and to parse Wallace Stevens's stunning observation that "The sea is a form of ridicule...
...But on another level—and this is one of the very fine things about TV—it brought us together, reinserted each of us into our first-person mode of storytelling, faster and more gently than maybe any means of communication conceivable before the last forty years...
...And its epicenter (that's ground zero in quakespeak) was in Northridge: twelve miles, being generous, from Celeste's parents' home...
...This is important...
...In the smartest book I' ve ever read on TV, No Sense of Place (Oxford, 1986), Joshua Meyerowitz observes that the most important single bit of information transmitted by the six o'clock news is just that it does come on at six o'clock...
...It's an otherwise-impossible connection with the eye of the storm...
...And conversely, when as on January 17 the world, or part of it, slips the rails, the medium can at its best be a voice—not entertainment, not news, not even "fact," but a voice—that by reminding us that we can say "we," helps each of us back to being able to say "I...
...It's the sort of episode writers love to self-righteousize over: just look how the medium converts private pain into tawdry spectacle...
...For, in its bad moods, so is the earth...
...Coffee...
...So are presidential assassinations in Dallas, urban riots, and little girls fallen down wells...
...Slouching kitten-from and kitchen-ward for coffee, he passes the den where Celeste and his mother-in-law, Dolores, are watching TV, expressions rapt and anxious...
...It comforts Celeste and Dolores and the McC is grateful...
...But I think it important to take note that, in events like the quake, the Rodney King riot, the Challenger disaster, und so weiter, it can also turn the unspeakable into the bearable: and that is a quintessentially human act...
...Californians, most of the time, maintain or impersonate a throwaway sangfroid about quakes, a what-the-hell nonchalance...
...The McConnell, perhaps at least in part because Celeste so much resembles Audrey, slips happily back into REM placidity...
...that aren't down are as mobbed as O'Hare Airport on Christmas Eve...
...talking from his home miles away, about the varieties of trauma, for crying out loud, while the guy is still in pain, and when they finally get him out, the ground camera crew tries its level best to get the lens up his kazoo while he's gurneyed into the ambulance...
...Prurience...
...Lots...
...KNBC in Los Angeles, to be precise, where the day-long coverage was orchestrated by a very talented anchorman named—you gotta admire God's gift for irony—-Kent Shockneck...
...Dolores...
...In our private catastrophes, this is the motive—actually the survival-value—of every tale from Gilgamesh to this morning's installment of Doonesbury or for that matter Mary Worth (yeah: I never miss it...
...Her father, Carl, stayed behind in their home in Agoura...
...The paramedics have been trying for hours to break through the roof and get him out, all covered from a telecopter...
...When Dan or Tom or Peter materialize at precisely 1800 hours, you know that today, at least, the world has stayed within the track of the comprehensible...
...Forget it...
...For while the NBC crew was covering the rescue, they, and the viewers, and, yes, even Doctor Bruce were also, in a funny way, being covered...
...I'm no longer telling the tale of my life, the tale's telling me...
...Now self-appointed media pundits like Neil Postman and the appalling Mark Crispin Miller love to talk about the numbing, dehumanizing effect of the Tube, turning "real life" into mere entertainment: "Big Brother is you, watching," as Miller preppily sniffs...
...And of course there's voyeurism involved: TV is, after all, a human medium, and since Lot's wife—the first TV junkie?— that's been one of our best things...
...Tornadoes and hurricanes, even to a degree droughts and floods, we can now map and predict...
...Nobody, Jim: you're gonna watch TV, as did, the whole day long, the McC and his worried wife and mother-in-law...
...What the Tube did for us all was, on one level, probably very like what happened when our hirsute ancestors huddled together in a cave during a thunderstorm, drawing bison on the walls and sharing bits of tapir meat or whatever...
...The planet has just rared up and bitten you on the ass...
...And this was a Big One: six-point-something-fo'g/t on the exponential Richter scale...
...Aftershock," by the way, is the PC of quakespeak, like calling "blind" "visually challenged": when you're in the damned thing, it's another earthquake...
...They are the moments that escape, or shatter, the stories of our lives we are constantly telling ourselves, and for which another name is "consciousness...
...By 9:00 a.m...
...Quakes— except for dinosaur-killer meteors—are the last survival of what must have been humankind's aboriginal, god-spawning awe at a capricious, maybe malevolent Nature...
...and leaves the room...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 3
