THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: 71 lines
My grandmother used to put on her flannel nightgown, climb into bed on the second floor of our family home and indulge in her only vice. She'd read lurid crime magazines like True Detective and scare herself silly.
In their pages she found grainy police photos and lurid prose describing horrific homicides, torso murders, crimes of passion, psychopatholgy and depravity. Often she was reading about decades-old crimes from the other side of the continent, but they were vivid enough to give her the heebie-jeebies.
After reading a few of them, she couldn't go to sleep until she went downstairs to make sure that the door was locked, the windows bolted, the lights on and several booby traps had been set.
When a member of the family stayed out late, he could always tell if she'd been reading True Detective. He'd return home to find himself locked out because she wouldn't just lock the door, she'd leave the key in the lock from the inside half turned.
This brilliant ploy wouldn't have kept a crazed psychokiller at bay for a moment. But those of us who didn't want to start breaking glass or removing doors from hinges were effectively stymied. To gain entry we'd have to resort to throwing gravel from the driveway at her window which provided a kind of bonus in that it persuaded her the Murder Inc. hit men of her fevered imaginings had finally arrived to do her in.
Now, thanks to the proliferation of tabloid television, satellite weather and the other fruits of modern technology, we can all scare ourselves silly all the time. Modern media do 24 hours a day for each of us what pulp detective magazines did for my grandmother each night - they give us unrealistic things to worry about.
Back then, she read about stanglers in California, mobster killings in Manhattan, gang violence in big cities and Gothic horrors in the Deep South, and imagined them all converging on her bedroom. She gave herself the willies.
Now we all seem to be inhabiting the same global village and Polly Klaas, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy live just down the block while Hurricane Ariel is bearing down on us.
Greater access to information is nice in theory, but in practice we all may know more than is good for us about natural disasters and man's unnatural inhumanity to man. The constant drumbeat of grim news and the ability of the media to bring it up close and personal troubles our sleep and contributes to a sense of perpetual anxiety.
Thirty years ago, my grandmother lived in a small town where the crime rate was essentially nil, but that didn't prevent her from imagining the worst. Today, we all live in a maelstrom of mayhem.
Crime statistics have actually improved somewhat, but people feel less secure than ever. Intellectually we may know that we live in relative safety, but each evening on the news, on violent cop shows and in superviolent movies we witness dozens of shootouts, assaults, serial killings, stalkings, murders, kidnappings, atrocities.
Once, if bad weather was coming, we'd find out about it when the trees began to blow, the barometric pressure dropped or the lights went out. Now we can watch killer storms inch inexorably toward us hour after hour on the color radar. They almost never arrive, but by the time the all clear is announced, we've experienced as much inner turmoil as if they had blown the house down.
I'm beginning to think Henry Thoreau was right. He had a pretty low opinion of the news, or at least of our prurient interest in it. He argued that if you had read about one train blown up or cow run over or ship lost at sea, it was enough. The principle was all that mattered, and a lot of instances was a waste of time.
But few of us are so philosophical. I'm as transfixed as the next guy by the endless stream of news that comes into my living room each night. And when I switch off the set, I lock my doors. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB