The Anchoress

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing a remark of Buster’s that touched on time and trends and what it all means in Lent. I’m thinking to expand on it a little. I had written:

[Buster] was looking at a front page picture and headline about Britney Spears and her shaved head and he mused, “so, this is what someone does with his life…follows people around taking pictures of them having some sort of breakdown…and maybe he thinks that’s all God made him for. If he’s thinking at all.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sad to think that this is what a grown-up person does for a living, isn’t it? Perhaps that photographer really loves the craft and art of photography, maybe he has a God-given gift for seeing the world differently than the rest of us through his camera…but this is what he does with it. And when he dies, maybe that will have been the sum of his whole life - he took a picture of a young women with limited emotional resources, while she was having a really horrible day. I wonder if he ever wonders if this is all God loved him into being and gave him a singular vision for.”

I’m thinking about it now because of this piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez, about a woman named Nazanin Afshin-Jam, whose name does not come immediately to your mind, or roll off your tongue as easily as does the troubled but ultimately unremarkable Ms. Spears. Ms. Afsin-Jam- also an aspiring pop-star - is remarkable, though. Writes Lopez:

At the end of January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian prison. She had been there for almost two years for the “crime” of self-defense against would-be rapists. Nazanin, then 17, fatally stabbed one of the attackers.
[...]

Afshin-Jam, an aspiring pop singer whose first record’s release has been delayed as she has worked on saving the life of this young Iranian Kurd, shows what a little star-power and a lot of determination can do. Read the whole thing.

Afshin-Jam uses her influence to bring about the release of a woman imprisoned for the crime of defending herself against rape, and she is no one’s hero. The feminist left does not lionize her and shout her name and call her “good for women.” The press doesn’t cover her. But Britney…she’s ubiquitous, she’s and her sad, desperate bald head are all over the place…not for doing anything heroic, mind you, but for entertaining us with her misery, for allowing herself to be consumed, if that is what it takes to get our attention.

Where is the press on this story? Why is Nazanin Afshin-Jam not on the cover of Newsweek? Why aren’t they covering this remarkable celebrity, when any two-bit pissant Hollywood cracker can be heralded as a wise and benevolent prophet for cursing at the president and Christians, or crying over Africa? Why isn’t the new feminist icon of journalism, Katie Couric - or Oprah - talking about this story, and the larger story behind it - the one that for some reason “liberal” feminists are too timid to mention - honor killings, the cold-blooded murders of rape victims who have “dishonored” their families by being unfortunate enough to be raped.

What about this revolting story about an emotionally distraught man killing his wife and four daughters - 4 - for the crime of daring to dream, and to long to live out fully their God-given potentialities. He did this as his son lay dying of cancer. Grief and the death of a beloved son can certainly bring strain and desperate behavior, but I’m inclined to think that in a culture which valued its women, “killing them all” would be an unlikely response to such stress. Michelle Malkin is talking about it - you know, evil, nazi, womyn-hating Michelle Malkin. But those glories of modern feminism…they’re awfully silent. Well, they’re not silent, actually. They’re busy cursing the patriarchal Catholic Church and the Christians who keep women down. You know…they’re reality-based.

Getting back to Buster…when he and I talked about the press, he took issue with my last remarks. He said, “Well, you could say that about all journalists. That they chase a story or a person and it redeems no one.”

“No, but that’s not always true,” I said. “Journalism can be noble or ignoble. You’re right that this [Spears] story is tawdry and probably unredemptive. It may warn a person or two away from living a life of dissolution, but the truth is, most people reading this are eating Spears’ misery for their entertainment. They joke about her; then they feel better about themselves. This photographer and this editorial board are cynically giving the public what it wants, but literally everyone who writes or reads this crap is enveloped in the same stench that comes from treating a person like a thing. But journalism can also raise us up. Think of the picture of JFK Jr, saluting his father’s coffin as it passed him by, or the picture of the Vietnamese girl running away from a firestorm. Think of the image of three firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Center. Those were instructive, not exploitative. Those images did not drag us into a gutter; they raised our collective understanding. When the press wants to, it can tell the redemptive story. Lately they just don’t seem to want to.”

Craig Ferguson is not a newsman, but he’s not joking about Spears. He’s not serving her up as this week’s main course, and he deserves some credit for that. But too many are feeding the public utter garbage, and - sadly - the public appetite seems ravenous for it, gobbling it down and then banging on the table with knives and forks in their pudgy little hands screaming, “more, more!”

Perhaps it is true that we have gotten the journalism - the media - that we deserve. I hope not. Gerard Vanderleun writes affectingly here about how easy it is to look at a picture of a machete-chopped-up child and then go out to supper with friends and have a good time. We compartmentalize. We read or see a news story, we gasp and wonder, and maybe we even tear up a bit…then we turn the page, or a commercial comes on, or a newscaster brightly announces the debut of a water-skiing canary, and we forget - we move on. Because as Vanderleun writes:

The child rotting in the brackish water was, after all, not a child at all. The child was long since buried or left to dissolve as mere carrion. What had disturbed me was only the abstraction of a child snagged out of the world with photographic film, transmitted across the oceans via orbiting satellites. printed up on sheets of flimsy paper, and delivered to me and millions of others on a weekly basis…. to what purpose? To. What. Purpose.

You’ll have to read his whole provocative piece to discover his conclusions, and I urge you to. But first, think about something simpler: One of the best definitions of sin I have ever read is this one: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Journalism can cast down or raise up. It can serve us horrifyingly clear pictures of mutilated children, or it can mutilate a celebrity for us, just to keep our interest piqued. But it needn’t. If we would stop reading the crap, the sinful stuff, the stuff that treats human beings like mere things to be used to increase circulation for as long as they last - then maybe the press would stop serving it up. If we would stop treating barely literate celebrities like PhD’s and Eco-scientists because they once played a character who wore a lab coat, maybe the press would stop trotting them out to speak their assigned lines, and there would be room in the paper for redemptive and hopeful stories about people like Nazanin Afshin-Jam. Maybe attention might finally be paid to Caneze Riaz, and her daughters, Hannah, age 3, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, age 10, whose deaths surely deserve notice.

I know the concept of sin is abhorrent to many. I know that over the past 30-40 years we’ve managed to rationalize almost all behavior as sinless because “I’m a good person and I don’t intentionally hurt anyone…” But it’s Lent, and it’s time to be straight about things like sin, and fault and culpability. Yes, we all sin, all the time, even if we are “good people” and we do it without even realizing it, every time we chuckle at Britney Spears’ mad behavior, or click the mouse to leer at Paris Hilton’s latest crotch-shot, or look at a picture of a beautiful family of now-dead women whose plight goes unmentioned and unmourned, because it just doesn’t fit our political agendas at this precise instant.

Thank God for Grace. Thank God for opportunities to clear our heads and hearts and set our souls to rights, for as brief a period as we can manage. Thank God for Lent.

Eat your brussel sprouts. Offer it up. Live with appreciation for what you have and thoughtfulness about what you lack - not materially but spiritually. Turn off the television. Put down the magazine. Be silent. Be still. Close off a few of the world’s access routes to your mind, your consciousness and your soul.

We know everything we need to know, or we would, if we would only shut up - and shut out the intrusive noise of the world - and give ourselves a chance to listen.

Related:
Buster’s Pieta Signore, for Lent
Remember you are dust