When Messages Attack

I don't want to make light of tragedies. The sorts of events where people are killed and wounded? I want to actively not make light of tragedies. But then the damned fools who copy edit the mainstream media  -- despite tortuous levels of public piety maintained as a constant excuse for sensationalism and stupidity -- permit the front pages to insult the intelligences of daily millions with inanities such as this lede from CNN:

With a blast that made skyscrapers tremble, an 83-year-old steam pipe sent a powerful message that the miles of tubes, wires and iron beneath New York and other U.S. cities are getting older and could become dangerously unstable.

Please. I know no human act undertaken by someone in authority or power, however momentary, is explained nowadays as having any other meaning than to send a clear message or strong signal (an endemic dereliction of responsibility perpetrated under pretense of refining its awareness) but -- steam pipes do not send messages. Not even exploding steam pipes. Exploding steam pipes explode.
 

My plea: stop making facts into seance routines -- guess the signal, scry the import, mutter the portent. Bizarrely, in our apparent enthusiasm to divorce people from their actual acts, creating a phantom world of messages with more meaning than events, we imbue the behavior of objects with some primitivist postmodern form of animism. This is so LA, so Dark Ages -- things, including noncorporeal things, carry more responsibility for what happens in the world than the human beings who people it. Hobbes would cross himself. Blasts do not lift a finger, clear their throats and "raise questions," and exploding pipelines most assuredly do not draft and post missives. They cause we the corporeal, we human agents, harm. How this cannot ensure reportage delivered in an adequately grounded language remains another unsolved mystery.

Comments

[John Gorentz]

Ha! I steal that line, "stop making facts into seance routines." But we'll remember where it was said first!

[Joules]

I wonder if the journalist thinks he/she does a public service by wording it so that the steampipe incident seems like a portent of further explosions to come.