Jack Shafer

Like me, you’ve probably been flipping from the Weather Channel to CNN with one hand and raking the Web with the other, searching for scenes of maximum destruction from Hurricane Sandy. Long after satisfying your basic news needs about the horrific body counts, power outages, travel advisories, school closings, and surges of tidal and river water to come, you’ve likely been loitering around your screens for more. Somebody tweets about a live video feed of a construction crane gone limp in midtown Manhattan, and we go there. Emails from friends direct us to videos of vehicles floating through lower Manhattan like derelict bumper cars and the shattering of the Atlantic City boardwalk into toothpicks. Next up, toppled trees, washed-out rails, flooded streets, subways, and tunnels, and the sinking of HMS Bounty.

Oh, the horror! Pass the popcorn.

Advanced voyeurs (you know who you are) understand that shame, rather than being a deterrent, actually works to reinforce both the urge to look and to share what we’ve seen. I’d have continued watching TV and scanning the Web until the early a.m., messaging to my friends and family what I’d seen, had not the pop and flash of a nearby transformer killed my electric power at 9:30 p.m. on Monday.

What impels us to watch, to hunger for more disaster and mayhem, and to keep on watching long after we’ve learned all there is to know? Wake Forest University English Professor Eric C. Wilson gathers some clues in his new book, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away. We never feel more alive than in times of distress, danger, and calamity, Wilson writes, whether we experience it directly or at a televised remove, watch it dramatized in a movie, or read it in a novel. He cites a psychologist to theorize that our morbid curiosity has an evolutionary function: Being well-informed about dangers and potential dangers helps us survive; finding points of empathy through which we can connect with those who have suffered allows us to build lasting bonds. Wilson discusses the cultural appeal of fairy tales, horror films, and “documentaries” like Faces of Death; he recycles the now-standard view that gruesome and graphic stories prepare the young for adulthood; and he reminds us of how Aristotle schooled us in the value of catharsis to explain our fascinations with the perverse.

Or is our connection with the macabre more about animal arousal than it is evolution? Wilson, backed by Kant and Burke, surmises that as long as we can watch from a safe vantage point—but the closer the better—we can “undergo a sublime experience” while observing the suffering of others or a catastrophe. I suspect that the sublime experience is a learned one—that the first time you rubberneck a car crash you don’t quite understand it but over time, by poking dead cats flattened on the highway and going to your grandmother’s open-casket funeral, you eventually get it. From there—at least for boys—emerge new horizons, the delights of setting off firecrackers taped to robin’s eggs and of breaking schoolroom windows after hours. As P.J. O’Rourke once put it, “making things and breaking things” brings the only true joy in life. When nature builds something as powerful as a hurricane that breaks things in new and inventive ways, how can we not gawk? We’re all transported back to the sandbox where we, young creator-destroyers, obliterated the cities of sand we’d carefully constructed.

Proximity to the action is essential for us to experience the sublime, Wilson argues, and I agree.  Natural disasters in Asia made for dry reading back in the day when news was transmitted by telex and newsreel. But 24-hour-news satellites, cheap video cameras, and the Internet have made all disasters local, whether they be tsunamis in Thailand and Japan, earthquakes in New Zealand, or terrorist attacks in New York and London. Television and the Web place us in the comfortable zone between too-far-away-to-feel-the-rush and I’m-so-damned-close-I-got-splattered-with-blood. As I noted above, the media buzz I got last night from the Hurricane Sandy coverage could have kept me up for hours beyond my usual bedtime. Had my electric power been restored by morning, I don’t have to tell you what my first act would have been upon awakening.

News of merger talks between book publishers Random House and Penguin has shaken loose alarmist responses from the book industry: howls from agents and authors that they’ll have fewer publishers to pitch to, and hence their incomes will fall; warnings that editors and marketers face huge layoffs; fears that reducing the number of big publishers from six to five will bestow upon the survivors unprecedented cultural hegemony.

Somewhere somebody must be describing the impending merger and the increased concentration of book power in fewer New York hands as an assault on democracy.

If the admonitions seem familiar, it’s because they’ve been sounded for a half century. The book industry has been consolidating steadily since the early 1960s, when independent publishers–many of them run by families–swarmed. A July 31, 1960, New York Times article (subscription required) chronicled that era’s merger-mania, as independent publishers Holt, Rinehart, and Winston had hooked up to create a new company—Holt, Rinehart, and Winston—that sounded like a law firm. In other transactions, Random House had acquired Knopf and Crowell-Collier had taken Macmillan, presaging the coming days when conglomerates would eventually swallow the industry’s major players.

Before he has even had time to measure his office windows for draperies, incoming New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson is in the media crosshairs. No less a figure than Times‘s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, implored the paper this week to investigate what role, if any, Thompson had in a burgeoning scandal at the BBC, which he headed for eight years until late this summer.

The BBC scandal is so long-running, so multifaceted and so sordid that it could potentially injure everyone who has worked at the organization over the past 40 years—up to Thompson but including the janitors who clean the BBC’s studio dressing rooms—even if they’re guilty of nothing.

The scandal’s center is Jimmy Savile, the longtime host of a variety of BBC radio and TV programs for kids and young people (including the Top of the Pops), a celebrity fundraiser and friend to politicians and royalty. Late last year, shortly after Savile died, the BBC’s Newsnight program readied an investigative piece about Savile’s alleged sexual abuse of young girls. But just as the findings were about to be broadcast, Newsnight‘s top editor gave it the spike.

The great fact-checking crusade of 2012 by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, The Fact Checker, CNN Fact Check, AP Fact Check, etc. has told us something very important about the workings of democracy that we already knew: Candidates bend the truth, distort the facts, fudge the numbers, deceive, delude, hoodwink, equivocate, misrepresent, and, yes, lie, as a matter of course.

Both major-party presidential candidates and their campaigns routinely lie, as a Time magazine cover story recently documented, although the publication gave Mitt Romney’s campaign top honors for lying more frequently and more brazenly. Time is not alone in its assessment: Romney also leads Barack Obama in the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker “Pinocchio” sweepstakes. But the lies will continue until Nov. 6, after which the chief mission left to the checkers will be to determine whether the winner was a bigger liar than the loser.

The candidates lie about each other, they lie about themselves, they lie about issues they know intimately, and they lie about issues they barely understand. Of Romney, the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank writes today that the candidate has changed, reversed and obliterated his views so many times that “Whatever Romney’s positions were, they are no longer.”

When was the last time the inhabitants of wonkville got so hot over a federal statistic dropping three-tenths of a percent?

This morning – after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report stating that the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September – everybody started shouting about the numbers. President Barack Obama used them as evidence of economic progress, challenger Mitt Romney swatted them aside and scoffed that this “is not what a real recovery looks like,” and Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric (and current Reuters Opinion contributor) tweeted that Obama’s “Chicago guys” had fudged the encouraging numbers to make up for the poor performance of their boss in the Oct. 3 debate. This prompted the proprietors at @PuckBuddys to tweet, “Truthers, Birthers and now Welchers.”

Ezra Klein, the mayor of wonkville, rushed to defend the integrity of the numbers in his Washington Post blog, pointing to a Mar. 9, 2012, Post story about the secret-agent measures taken by the BLS statisticians to prevent tampering with the data or the results. Computers: encrypted and locked. Office windows: papered over. Confidentiality agreements: signed each morning. Emails and phone calls from unknowns: unanswered during the eight days of lockdown preceding the job report release. Visitors: none permitted without security clearance. Trash cans: not emptied by custodians during the period.