TMZ and the Widening Gyre

Last night I went to the local Irish Pub for a Guinness, a salad, and a few minutes of watching the Reds struggle against Houston. When I returned to the estate my better half says, "Check this out," and clicks at something on the PC. And then I listen to Alec Baldwin verbally assualt his 11-year-old daughter on an MP3 file that presumably was being listened to by half America at the same time.

Welcome to 2007. We're finally getting the hang of the Internet. Movie stars are using it to discredit their former spouses (not without some justification in this case, it would seem), college students are using it to send video and IMs during a shooting rampage, while the killer himself prepares ranting, angry "multi-media" packages for post-mortem disbursement. Scandals like Imus-gate are compressed and amplified and play out in a couple of days - thanks to the "lock step" liberal activism of groups like Media Matters.

I'm a geeked out blogger with RSS newsfeeds coming out the wahoo, and even I can't keep up. News items are sometimes into several cycles before I learn about them. John McCain said what about Iran? And the media already got in his grill? Oh, and he already told them to where shove it in response? Sorry, I was out walking the dog. Did anything else happen while I was gone?

Our society needs to take a break, and go to the beach wearing flip flops. We need to check out of the relentless media hurricane for just a few minutes and find some way to reconnect. Now don't get me wrong - regular readers know I'm too much of an old salt to get behind some bogus, wellness seminar chicken-jive. But I look at how desensitized we've become - and the furious pace of media in the infromation age and I think something is Koyaanisqatsi, the center cannot hold.

I guess I'm down with Peggy Noonan.