That graphic is from the msnbc.com home page for today, showing the general state of the business world. When I was an adolescent -- which is to say, long into my thirties -- I would have rudely jeered such news, because I thought it was only about financiers and tycoons. And indeed, until the late 70s at the earliest, there was no business reporting the way there is now. These stories about Starbucks and GM and the airlines -- no one would have cared about such things (not that there was Starbucks then).
Now I see that while it's still true that business news affects mostly tycoons and financiers, it also affects the poor saps who lose their jobs. I'm not likely to lose my job for the foreseeable future, but I've also been wrong about that before. Who among us can really be sure what's going to happen next month, much less next year or in ten years?
Remember the summer of 2001, and what the biggest news story was? The disappearance of Chandra Levy (here's Wikipedia for those who don't remember). It seemed so important! Some poor sap of a Congressman from Modesto was suspected of being (but turns out not to have been) involved in the woman's disappearance. Then something rather more dramatic happened involving some airliners, and the story of the Congressman and the missing woman vanished.
Of course, the Violet Blue-BoingBoing kerfuffle makes the Levy case look like serious news. A real woman was murdered. This week's scandale des Internets is a little less weighty, but somehow I feel we're tempting fate again and are due for another rude shock. What'll it be this time?
1 comment:
It's already happened, my dear, I'm afraid. We have only been slow to apprehend it. We have met the terrorists, and they are us.
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