Sovo Blog

Southern Voice Online

I don't want to write an opinion of this piece. However I would like to complain about finding it on the front page of Google News. The article is clearly a blog, not "news". Opinions are fine but one look at Southern Voice's homepage tells you that you already know the author's point of view. I wonder how I can make suggestions to the Google Folks.

Anyway, today's halfarsed opinion concerns coverage of the Indian Ocean disaster. I don't watch much American TV news, but what I've seen of British coverage is a bit sad. True, travel in disaster zones is difficult. That's still no excuse to interview only British vacationers who can't get an airplane out of the country. When there are a couple thousand resort dwellers complaining about a holiday gone bad, that's rough, but surrounding them are hundreds of villages where people had no decent housing in the first place. Now, with some Europeans worrying about how to get off private islands to their well-built homes abroad, it'd be a good show of sympathy for them to consider how their temporary neighbors don't have homes at all. I find it difficult to sympathize with families that can afford Christmas flights to India anyway, especially considering those families are still alive. Meanwhile, their bellhop and five-year-old daughter are being buried in a mass grave in the backyard. That part DID make it onto the news.

In related misperceptions, President Clinton described the disaster as something like a horror movie. Wow, it looks so real it's like it's really happening! Meanwhile President Bush--himself on vacation--announced we would bump up our humanitarian aid to $35 million, about as much as the budget for a cheap horror film. Assuming there are 275 million Americans, that means we're donating a little under 13 cents per person. Ever wish you were paying more taxes?

My typographical diarrhea reminds me of the Beck song "Tropicalia". I will reprint the lyrics below without permission.

"When they beat
Upon a broken guitar
And on the streets
They reek of tropical charms
The embassies lie in hideous shards
Where tourists snore and decay

When they dance in a reptile blaze
You wear a mask
An equatorial haze
Into the past
A colonial maze
Where there's no more confetti to throw

You didn't know what to say to yourself
Love is a poverty you couldn't sell
Misery waiting in vague hotels
To be evicted

You're out of luck
You're singing funeral songs
To the studs
They're anabolic and bronze
They seem to strut
In their millennial fogs
'Til they fall down and deflate

You didn't know what to say to yourself
Love is a poverty you couldn't sell
Misery waiting in vague hotels
To be evicted

Now you've had your fun
Under an air-conditioned sun
It's burned into your eyes
Leaves you plain and left behind
See them eyes and fall
Into the jaws of a pestilent love

You didn't know what to say to yourself
Love is a poverty you couldn't sell
Misery waiting in vague hotels
To be a victim"