LIFE
The Absurdity of Reading Newspapers
Why even read them if we can do nothing about them?
‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’
‘Yes?’
‘Though it’s no good buying newspapers . . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!’
Wrote Virginia Woolf in ‘Mark on the Wall’. She spared me the effort of thinking up lines.
A couple of weeks back, I was at the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. The Little Man that dropped on Aug 6, 1945, destroyed the city beyond salvation, bringing the relentless Japanese to their knees (or their graves), ostensibly bringing peace after seven years of war.
At least 70,000 people died in the hours following the blast. Radiation sickness, cancer, and other unimaginable side effects tripled the death toll in the months and years that followed. The intense heat of the bomb just vaporized everyone in its immediate blast radius. A few others bore 5th-degree burns until they crawled to death a few days later.
In the museum is an artifact, a tricycle, of a 3-year-old boy named Shinichi Tetsutani, the story behind which was published by the survivor Tatsuharu Kodama.
Shin and his friend, Kimi, were outside the family’s home, playing with his favorite toy — a tricycle with red handlebars. After the blast at 8.15 am, the house collapsed. Searching in the wreckage, they found Shin pinned under a house beam, badly hurt. His face was bleeding and swollen but his hand still held the red handlebar grip from his tricycle.
The museum was constructed as a beacon of peace and a reminder of the human cost of war. Each picture and artifact in the museum tells the story of a person, not a statistic. It urges us to learn from the past and never repeat it.
Ms.Woolf says God damn this war. It’s hard to tell which war she was talking about because there have been so many in the last 100 years.
The war(s) are on all of our minds. News media offers hourly updates on the death toll, daily or weekly analysis of the negotiations, and annual reports on the history behind the wars. But in the plethora of information, we miss the Shin and the Kimi of these wars. All of those graphics that keep playing in the loop have a way with our minds, roasting it and leaving us responsible for sweeping away the soot.
Lately, on every attempt at sweeping my mental chimney, I find myself second-guessing, and self-censoring. Am I going too far? Will this be deemed offensive, illegal, or incitement of hatred? Am I going to get fired? Will I be deported?
Much like other EU countries, my country of residence, Germany offers freedom of expression. However, this comes with a wide berth of abstract limitations that could be interpreted in whichever way.
If I criticize beer, which many Germans drink even for breakfast, will that be deemed hate speech against segments of the population and in a manner that is capable of disturbing the public peace? If I beg for peace, will that be considered antisemitic?
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I consider myself a writer. Rather, writing is the only vocation I’ve truly related to. Even during the months and years when I wrote nothing because my mind was stunted enough to think up a word, I considered myself a writer. That is how I socially engage. That’s how I make sense of this absurdity that life is.
But self-censorship is the parent of second-rate work. Writing is a way of leaving the footprint; the way the prehistoric humans left their drawings in the cave to say we were here. But those footprints are what the trackers look for first. So I keep my chimneys unswept and suffocate in carbon monoxide.
This kind of self-censorship isn’t new to me. In my teens, during my early days of blogging, I had written a political piece in which I criticized government corruption and had colorful adjectives for the state’s chief minister. My readership may not have extended beyond my close family and friends.
Yet, when my dad read the article, he requested, begged, and ordered that I take it down. He didn’t disagree with the contents, but he was worried for my safety. However, that incident taught me how to express myself without resorting to expletives.
India, much like Germany, left a wide berth for interpretation in limiting freedom of expression. Anything that impacted the security of the state or the integrity of the country was considered punishable. But who decides what affects the country’s integrity?
For all its vices, the US was the only country that didn’t make me pause to speak up. There was a bigger threat of some wacko shooting me than the government coming after me for some opinion I held. Fear would still not creep in even if I had written that Trump was a Manchurian candidate controlled from Moscow.
Most often, if it’s a politically incorrect opinion, one’s employer would cancel them. If they’re on a visa, the loss of employment would give the government sufficient reason to deport them. So, there was someone else to do the government’s bidding. However, there was still some hope.
But, it’s the same unchecked freedom of expression in the US that allows fake news and alternate facts, and allowed Trump to win in 2016, possibly also in 2024. After all, as Chomsky says, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” So, I wonder if I should cheer for unchecked freedom of speech after all.
Living on a visa, personal integrity is put to the test on a whole different level. We quickly learn to keep our heads down and bite our tongues if the expression of the opinion decides between survival and deportation.
At an age when I still had some adrenaline and a fighter spirit, I was pissed at what I considered my dad’s cowardice. However, growing older has a way of making you boring and all I have now is a flight spirit. Adulthood removes the black-and-white view of righteousness that dominates childhood. Actions have repercussions. I’m trying to ignore that inactions also have the same.
I have often wondered what made those wars a reality. How could it be that all those people across the world were so complacent in so many atrocities? Why did they go to war even if their chancellor or president or emperor asked them to? Why couldn’t they refuse? There isn’t a country in the world that hasn’t shed innocent blood.
It’s like boiling the frog. You raise the temperature a degree at a time until the frog can’t jump out. There might always have been people like me, who were worried about their immediate survival that they didn’t or couldn’t raise their voices.
So, did they, much like me, act in favor of evil by not acting?
The life of Wilhelm Furtwängler, one of the greatest conductors in history, comes to mind. Hitler came to power in 1932 when Furtwängler was at the peak of his glory. As a decent human being, Furtwängler denounced Hitler and hoped the Nazi party would be out of power soon.
He never joined the party, nor offered the Nazi salute. The party apparatus was determined to destroy him. As the cruelty of the regime unfolded, Furtwängler had two options. He could either compromise with them or leave.
He compromised. He didn’t indulge in any cruelty. He donated his earnings from concerts outside Germany to Jewish emigrants. He didn’t conduct in any countries like France that was occupied by Germany. But, leaving a permanent blotch on his glorious life, he compromised with the Nazis.
But, not compromising meant leaving his home, family, friends, and audience behind and moving to a country like the US to start his life afresh. From afar, Furtwängler unpardonably worked with the demon. But how can we judge the man for being human?
A couple of years back, during a particularly depressing season, one of my friends sent me the goodnewsnetwork. With every print or digital news outlet focusing only on negative coverage, most of which I could do nothing about, I was developing an acutely pessimistic view of life.
I was born into the cynical school of Diogenes. So with or without good news, there’s only so much optimism I can muster about this world. But the pessimism I’m talking about was of the level that made me lecture a few climate change activists who walked into my den seeking donations.
“What would you donate to save the earth”, they asked. “Earth knows how to save itself; you’re asking what would I donate to save our asses on Earth”, I retorted. I’m not proud of the exchange, but I don’t think I was wrong.
So, with that level of pessimism, my negativity was getting out of control. What the goodnewsnetwork carried was only meant for the readers to feel warm and fuzzy. It was my friend’s way of saying, the world isn’t all gloomy.
But the world is still gloomy in mainstream media. So what good is buying the newspapers, the mainstream ones, anyway?
A decade ago, every news media I followed, dedicated their coverage to the war in Syria. The atrocities committed by Bashar Al-Assad against the Syrian population were unimaginable. The war is still ongoing, but we no longer care about it. The attention then moved to the conflict in Lebanon, which also remains unresolved.
The war between Ethiopia & Eritrea, the one between Azerbaijan & Armenia, that in Yemen or Myanmar, had all experienced their share of front-page coverage until the world moved on. Ukraine war dominated our, especially of those living in Europe, consciousness until the one in Gaza started. Now Ukraine war feels like old news even though it’s going strong in its third year.
So, the newspapers care about fresh gossip. It’s not that people stopped dying in those conflicts which are still ongoing. But an increase in death statistics can only take their circulation so far.
There are wars about which I can do nothing. There’s an inflation, recession, and cost of living crisis which are also beyond my control. There’s a US election between two senile white men — neither of whom is capable of telling Mira from Mary, but are trusted with the nuclear gold codes — which is also something I have no power over. Reading about any of those isn’t helping my sanity. All it does is fill my chimney with a truckload of tar.
So, I cope by freezing my brain, undergoing a news-detox program, and learning to cook Japanese food.
