My Name is Lee Roy, and I Watch the News

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 22, 2006)

“I say get off our treadmills, grab a six pack and return to the old days when the news reports only lasted 15 minutes a day. Or better yet, follow the example of the Bali Advertiser who prints just 10 minutes of news once every two weeks. That’s enough for me. Yes, we would be a less informed populace but we Americans pride ourselves in being uninformed. It’s our heritage.” – Bali Bubba in a October 25 Letter to Bali Advertiser

Thank God the US elections are over. Now I can get back to following Britney’s break-up with K-Fed, Madonna’s adoption of that Malawian baby, Keith Urban’s stint in rehab, and the 24-hour cleavage coverage of Anna, Paris, and Pamela (Headlight News?). And what’s the latest on Mr. Crumbly Nose now that he’s moved to Dubai? Hasn’t dangled any babies lately, has he?

Mr. Bubba suggests a daily 15 minutes for a six-pack and news. That’s too fast even for watery American beer, and not enough time to get hysterical over the latest fright, the faddiest diet, the most recent report on the poisons in the air and water and the anti-toxins that counter them, the scariest current conspiracy to divide and conquer and make us buy McDonald’s burgers and American cars and submit to the United Nations, and the most up-to-date death tolls from bird flu, AIDS, poverty, malaria, cancer, and the war in Iraq.

Even if we could squeeze all that into a short quarter of an hour between chugging down the beer, how would we ever keep up with the lives of the celebrity stars that govern the universe? Or have time for the ‘Odd News’ bits about people stupider than us, who kill themselves in funny ways, mistake the gas pedal for the brake, attempt robberies and get stuck in the chimney flue, or do something wonderfully inventive and self-destructive with their buttocks and bottle rockets?

And that’s only if we try to keep up with what’s going on in the Western world. Apparently, judging from the number of celebrity ‘news’ shows on Indonesian TV, there is just as much cleavage to cover in Indonesia, and by extension and extrapolation, we can assume there are government scandals and public health dangers to keep up with as well. And wait a minute, aren’t there other countries, too? And they’ve all got television stations and newspapers? And now Al-Jazeera has an English-language channel? Talk about fair and balanced.

How to keep track of it all? I was going to suggest we organize in shifts, but from their comments, I fear Mr. Bubba and Mr. ParacelsusAsia have lost their enthusiasm for it. No doubt, they are right, we, the general public, do collectively spend too much time watching what passes for TV news, studying the Internet, and reading newspapers, tabloids, magazines, and gossip sheets. But there are real questions about how much is too much, how much is not enough. Do we ignore the world or barely skim the basics and risk getting caught unawares by something everyone else knows? For instance, do we risk continuing to cuddle chickens long after the bird flu pandemic has finally struck? Or do we go the other direction and check every story against several sources? How far is too far to go, how long is too long to discover ‘just the facts, ma’am’?

The first approach carries economic and personal risks for anyone living in a globally connected world, when a virus on a farm in China can be in New York City tomorrow, and when your India-based business making widgets can suddenly fail because a factory in Indonesia is violating your patent and flooding the market in Europe (trans-shipping through China, of course).

The second manner of dealing with the news – double-checking FOX, CNN, and MSNBC with stories off Yahoo News and the Web sites of the Washington Post, New York Times, Houston Chronicle, and USAToday, with a few odd-ball sites (WorldNetDaily, CounterPunch, et al) thrown in to get the crackpot versions – threatens to overwhelm. Especially when you can get constantly sidetracked by celebrity breakups (there’s a sex tape!) and stories of the latest alcohol and drug binges of the famous and infamous (my aversion therapy; there but for the grace of God…).

But now I feel I am coming close to confessing myself the charter member of the Bali chapter of NAA, News Addicts Anonymous: “My name is Lee Roy, and 15 minutes is too little, and 5 minutes more is never enough.”

Or maybe I can think of myself as the ‘canary’ down in the news mines. As long as I am chirping happily and nonsensically along every couple of weeks, readers can be assured that all is well, Mount Agung hasn’t exploded, the barbarians haven’t landed on the beaches, mercury and formaldehyde levels in local tuna haven’t reached fatal proportions. But should the chirping go silent or suddenly take on a frantic tone …

Run for your lives! Head for the hills! ‘They’, ‘it’, got me days ago!

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Saving My Father's Marbles

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 8, 2006)

“… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” – St. Matthew 6:21

We cleared out my parents’ attic this past trip home, and my father was happy to find he had not lost his marbles. They were in a box of keepsakes from his mother’s house, and we loaded them into the trunk of the car along with other items of more dubious sentimental value and took them to the storage unit we rent for a few hundred dollars a year. The same unit and facility hold the books I’ve never managed to get to Asia and sweaters I have no use for in the tropics. My older brother’s keepsakes and decade-old financial documents are there, too, and my sister’s wedding dress, and our childhood treasures, and odds and ends of past family life – a softball bat, a marble chess set, a rocking chair, old suitcases, stacks of National Geographic magazines, baseball hats and rotting gloves, and pairs of cowboy boots more hole than boot.

Anyone who’s been to the US recently has probably noticed the space given over to these concrete and steel blights on the landscape of modern America, taking up land that might once have been useful pasture or parking lot. My father says the storage facilities are a better racket than motels and apartment complexes, because owners and management don’t have to deal with living tenants, only castoffs that people can’t bring themselves to take to the dump.

My own prediction is that in fifty centuries, when archeologists are sifting through the sediment levels corresponding to our age and come across the local U-Store-It, they are at first going to be excited at their discovery of such a well-laid out series of tombs – so obviously catering to royalty and attendant court figures with the varying sizes of compartments. Then they will be confused at finding so many valueless collections of junk and no royal bodies. They will scratch their heads over what will become known as The Collector Society, and puzzle over 21st Century Americans the way we puzzle now over the elderly dead found in New York City apartments under mountains of old newspapers, transistor radio parts, and cheap Japanese dolls.

We will be thought a population of cat ladies and rat-packing kooks, peeping out doorways and making hurried runs to auxiliary cache sites, storing up trinkets and Crackerjack prizes, instead of grains and foods against lean years. We will be an archeological joke, something to tease anyone who saves anything at all in the great throwaway future that is coming. Perhaps this obsessive storing up of so many items of questionable value is linked to anxiety over what we already throw away daily -- pens, lighters, razors, contact lenses, cups, plates, napkins, diapers, cameras, ketchup and mustard packets, batteries, and stacks and stacks of newspapers, magazines, TV guides, and sales advertisements. It is hard not to think, “Shouldn’t we be saving some of this?” – and then attach an unreal greater value to anything not built to be obsolete in six months.

Or maybe we are just overrun, not neurotic. Today’s ordinary middle class American or European lives more comfortably and in greater ease than the pharaohs of Egypt (without the willing temple virgins and servants ready to sacrifice themselves on command). We have as much stuff, not bejeweled and made of gold, but it is ours and we love it and don’t want to part from it. And absent the sensible option of burying it with us when we are gone, we stack it in tin sheds and in the attic, and periodically visit the tomb which will never hold us and sift through the dregs of earlier days. The mummified pharaohs probably did the same all those centuries in their grand pyramids until the deserts finally robbed them of fluid movement and they rested at last.

But what else does one do with the things that stick? Letters, books, a favorite letter opener, a pocketknife given by a grandfather, a necklace of white shells bought one perfect summer at the beach when one certain girl gave you reason to hope, a stone and brass ring from Sumatra, a gold braided shirt from somewhere else. Their value is in the memories they stir, and we hold on to them as long as we value the memories, or until the memories have become so internalized that the things no longer need to be fondled and caressed to recall them. Or maybe we are always aware of the eventual disintegration of even the most durable items, no matter how we wrap and preserve them and ward off their destroyers with mothballs and incantations. Perhaps, too, we care for life’s detritus only because it reminds us that we will one day crumble ourselves, and all that will remain is another box of dust hidden away from sunlight and air.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi