Fame or Famine

Long ago, when our people were a verbal society without written word, cataclysmic events would be passed down from generation to generation through storytelling. Often the story would change and shift with the telling, but each generation could slowly internalize and chew over the events, and what was learned from them. Raconteuring is a delicate, lost art form that appears still vital to the human psyche. We all want to know what “we” went through. We want to know where we come from. In this vein, the performing arts have been invaluable tools to aid mental chewing and to offer hope and recovery.

Today we have the same needs, however in the immediacy of the technological age raconteuring has given way to money-grubbing dramatists that, rather than nurturing the event and respecting those involved, somehow cheapens the event and belittles the participants.

In every disaster the fundamental truth that remains is that the people involved are human. Some are born to be heroes, and some are weak and horrified. Some sit calmly, hands in their laps; some rush in to burning buildings to save babies, and some scream and hide until they are saved.

The essential truth is that each of those individuals has an equal right to life and an equal stake in the event itself. Telling the story of those who save the baby is legitimate, and so is telling the story of those that hid and were later rescued or died; but telling one without the other, soon after the event, disrespects everyone.

We make disasters our myths over time for a reason. The human mind is not meant to cope with destruction on that scale for very long. The results of long-term exposure to that kind of misery have been studied, and it’s not good. Internal processing takes time and patience and has stages that it has to go through. Hurrying that process artificially is detrimental.

When we attempt to tell a story that hasn’t fully sunk into the internal conscious mind, when we attempt to take a complex event and cram it into a two hour made-for TV movie, everyone is cheated. Rather than rich, woven tapestries of stories that deal with issues from many sides we wind up with a sound byte of the event. As if 9-11 or 7-7 could be compressed into a sound byte. As if they occurred in a vacuum, where there were no other mitigating factors than those recognized by the storyteller.

The performing arts certainly have historically had an important place in discussing disaster, war, famine, destruction and genocide. However, I do believe that playwrites and actors, screen directors and television producers would be well advised to leave the experience alone for at least 10 or 15 years in order for the human experience to begin to process the event.

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