being in Time   being in Time
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And THEN  

here is the news
august 6, 2009

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Days go by, another news cycle, more discoveries. “I’m at the front somewhere in Africa, and you're not—now this.

More sudden emergences: The call came in. This time, it wasn’t an emergency, just a sudden event worth noting. “Here Is The News: The market needs you—when we come back.”

No. The local angle—if it bleeds it leads—is a cliché and marginal to a calling devoted to inquiry and communication, often requiring great risk and thankless pursuit of fact and value. (Yet, the Roland Hedley angle is fun.)


In the news business, the emerging transforms into the growing. A plethora of reports from stringers are synthesized into The Narrative on The Moment. Follow-up on what’s sudden becomes prospecting significance. Memic and iconic narratives often gell into the times’ Event established by an aggregational consensus of attention.

Lesser narratives are relativized to the Event. Centripetal Events amalgamate into a near-term trend, giving gravity to a near-term ethos.

Follow-up on the Growing and Declining consolidates the season of The News.

Trends of attention emerge, then die away in light of the next Event.

Nonetheless, there are perduring stories responding to enduring questions, if only as diffuse elements of our evolving geographies enacting modes in our form of life: the economic way the world works, the international political order, etc. One may seek to track anything, e.g., the extent that leading governments seek regional development through mandates of the UN or IMF. Will the WTO foster social evolution? What is our duty to globally improve public health, reform educational opportunities, enforce human rights?

Here is the news: One doesn’t have time to keep up with any great fraction of it all. The editors meet; decisions are made, increasingly no longer relative to a print deadline, but relative to a 24/7 barrage of emergences that don’t wait for decent assimilation before they’re displaced. Politicians will exploit the public’s lack of time, their misinformation, and the market will shape its meaning. “Too much education and free time is a terrible thing to allow.” Political marketing loves you. Keep productivity at a maximum, others’ time always overwhelmed. Stay lean and mean.

There may be a singular Story that is the comprehensive Event of the daily planet evolving. (“Impoverished Asian ambition undermines American unionism,” one Event in the juggernaut). But a Story’s “being” has no Archimedean point from which to be composed, just our flurries of partial syntheses working like a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle relative to the chaotic netweave of countless ecospheres interplaying.

Here is the news: The gravitas of the Event conceals any primordiality of background evolving, like so many trees of a self-concealing forest.

But the times gain a prevailing interplay of characters, a somewhat-commonly-accepted narrative among voices who have the time (“leading opinion”), which becomes the historiographical baseline.

To look for evolutionarity in the topography is to wonder about some topology of the Ongoingness among prevailing Stories that unwittingly partner in historicization.

Here is the news: Scientific humanity designs its progress (the Ongoingness is to improve our form of life). The hyperNet City, the planetary metropole, prevails over issues of sustainability, virtues of liberalism, and all those Events with lives of their own.

I want to know what is living well, creative life, poetic mind, to know in general what are we Earthlings facing the silent cosmos.



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  Be fair. © 2018, gary e. davis