This morning, at 3:10am, the New York Times reports: "Two trains, one heading from Beijing to Qingdao and the other traveling between Yantai and Xuzhou, collided around 4:40 a.m. outside the town of Zibo, Shandong province. Witnesses said one train derailed on a bend in the tracks and then struck the other, throwing at least ten carriages into a ditch.The crash killed at least 66 people and injured hundreds more, authorities said, making it one of the deadliest rail accidents in recent years."
This is the problem for me with reading international news... there is a lack of immediate connection that I experience because of the epic physical distance that separates me and my life from such a far distant event. That lack of connection, for just a moment, allows my brain to wander unbounded by the rules of decency and decorum. Woody Allen said, "Comedy equals tragedy plus time." I would like to suggest that an analogous equation is: Comedy equals tragedy plus distance.
Here I am in the pre-dawn of a Brooklyn morning, sitting in front of my laptop computer, eating yogurt and reading the online version of this venerated newspaper, and this article about a train tragedy in China that occurred 7,000 miles away from where I live is the first thing I am reading... but because the physical context for this event is so outside my normal frame of reference, my first thought is not empathy or a profound sense of loss... but rather, I think:
"Hmmm, sounds like one of those high school math problems --- If a train leaves Beijing at 3:15am, and another train leaves Yantai at 2:45am, at what time will they collide outside of the town of Zibo in the Shandong Province, and how many people will die as a result?"
Of course, being raised a Protestant, my next thought is remorse and guilt for having had a such a thought, but still... the joke was my first thought.
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8 comments:
It will not seem so distant when China takes over America and instead the train collisions occur in between the newly-named cities of New Qingdao and Zibo, D.C.
When China takes over the US, then Mexico will have to rise up against the foreign invaders... and we will have entered into the great Chinese-Mexican War (that you have long prophesized).
you know we could treat this as a math problem
comedy = tragedy & time
comedy = tragedy & distance
since there are two tragedies we cancel those two out
that leaves time and distance
since those are both relative, nothing means anything and all that's left is to fuck mexicans and kill chinese.
ha. how about that?
oh yes,
post brought to by Snezan's Internet Persona ™
yea if you had been raised Buddhist or Hindu you could relax confident that the folks on the train had simply gotten the Karma they deserved.
impressive math there snezan... have you just invented relativistic math?
and you're right EC... but I think I would have been much less interesting if I had not been raised protestant...
I hear you on the distance sort of allowing the reality of the matter to be sapped…
Your thoughts on this brought to mind Neil Postman’s thoughtful book (Amusing Ourselves to Death)...but he was raise Jewish, so I'm not sure how that fits in here...
I love that book (Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death")... Huxley vs. Orwell... great stuff.
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