Leechcraft

There is something hideously fascinating about war news. The last week has given us a new one to follow--new geography to learn, "Ossetiya," new experts to hear from, and new smoke-shrouded, rubble-strewn streets to sorrow over. As long as there have been historians, they have attempted to explain why wars start, why they end--but they can't have gotten it right, else war would long ago have been done away with.

It's my theory that we don't have a theory. What if war is a disease that societies catch, and we are living in the era before germ theory? It could be evil spirits, we'd say, or unbalanced humors, or invisible miasmas that waft from battlefield to battlefield. When I listen to the pundits talk about war, what they tell me sounds like medieval pharmacopeia. Judging from the results, it's equally efficacious. Bleeding, as I recall, was one of the favored therapies.

Close to the bone

So much of the news, particularly the headline variety, just flows by, lost in the background clutter of life. Another bombing, another storm, another debate, a new candidate, a famous passing, an expert head articulating a sage opinion. We are poorly equipped to absorb information via newscasts and sound bites. Our ears have been trained by a hundred thousand years around the campfire, and what we want is a story. The news is beamed to us from without, but a story is something we can climb into and experience, as if it had happened to us. This is the power of narrative, and when the right story comes along, it not only sweeps the news aside, it colors our hearing of all the news thereafter.

I think of the dry-as-dust debate now current on the costs and prospects of the war and the merits of this strategy or that for going forward--the carefully tuned language, the assembling of consensus around various resolutions--and then I think of the story this week about a horribly wounded soldier and his brother’s reassignment from the war zone to Walter Reed in order to care for him, and of his family’s move to DC to help out. I could put myself in the place of the soldier, or the place of the brother, or the displaced sister-in-law. I could not put myself in the place of the committee chair or the think-tank pundit. And so I hear the war news now with an ear borrowed from that family’s experience.

Closer to home is the story of a couple whose car went off the Northway, unseen on a bitter night. The husband froze while his wife tried to raise help in a cell phone dead zone. Anyone who has driven winter roads in the North Country long enough has been in that car, watching the windows frost up, listening to the silence. Years of debate on how and when and who and whether to build out phone coverage along the road has changed overnight. No one will be able to speak on this issue again, without reference to this story. And I doubt another winter will come without a network in place. The various stakeholders will work it out--because the story runs too close to the bone.