America Doesn't Believe in Fate

America Doesn't Believe in Fate
January 27, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, January 27 (UPI) -- If you peruse the foreign press in countries that have passionate and colorful writing-- countries like Italy, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Thailand--you start to notice how bland our own newspapers are in many ways.

I can only read these papers in translation, and yet even with that handicap I can sense certain enthusiasms that would be quite strange if they turned up here. For example, in Russia, people become so enraged on the subject of ballet--that woman is too old for the part! Plisetskaya did it better in '87! he hasn't been able to leap since he married that third-rate dancer from the provinces!--that it's really like a combination of "The Jerry Springer Show," "Super Bowl Countdown" and the Page Six gossip column of the New York Post. But it's a good thing, I think. If people can get that excited about ballet, then they'll probably end up with a lot of excellent young ballet dancers who get hooked on the drama of it all.

Similarly, most other countries obsessively follow the fortunes of their greatest writers. A national poet or novelist, even in the most backward Third World country, is tracked by the press wherever he goes, and even his speeches are covered in detail. Do we have even a single novelist or poet who gets this kind of attention? Inevitably these foreign newspapers speak of the writer expressing the "national soul." Do we even know what our national soul would look or sound like?

Of course, a national press will always represent the quirks and oddities of its own people. In Denmark the papers are full of quips and jests and satirical thrusts; they love to lampoon politicians, and the politicians seem to relish the attention even when they're the constant butt of jokes. In Mexico they love crime. You haven't made it as a Mexican reporter unless you can describe bullet-riddled bodies in gory detail, preferably with plenty of wailing quotes from keening widows.

One thing you notice right away about any foreign country is that soccer--"football" everywhere else in the world--is the drama around which all hopes and aspirations of the people are played out. The football players are all known by name--more so even than in our own sports-crazed nation--and their private lives are more or less non-existent. The players on the national team give up all rights to individual glory. They're like gladiators who must sacrifice everything for the people. And when they're not obsessing over football, many countries get hepped up for track and field sports, which barely even register on our radar. They still believe that a footrace is the purest form of competition.

But there's one type of story you come across again and again, and I think the coverage of it tells us something fundamental about how different we are from the rest of the world. I'll give you some examples:

1. A school bus is scheduled for maintenance, but the mechanic crew goes home early, rescheduling the maintenance for the following week. As a result the brakes on the bus malfunction, it topples onto its side and three children are crushed to death.

2. A woman is having an affair with her best friend's husband. She knows the husband is on his way to kill his wife, but instead of calling police, she runs to the man's brother, begging him to stop him. By that time it's too late.

3. A South American S.W.A.T. team identifies a house where terrorists are believed to be hiding. After surrounding the house and demanding that the terrorists surrender, they break out the windows and flood the place with smoke bombs. A two-year-old child dies from smoke inhalation, and there are no terrorists inside after all.

If any of these stories happened in America, there would be- -what's the first word that comes to mind, class?-- That's right. Outrage.

It should never have happened.

The guilty party must be punished.

The bus mechanics are evil felons. The cheating girlfriend should go to prison. The commander of that S.W.A.T. team should be court-martialed.

And then there would be a second round of stories: Why don't we have more regulations affecting bus maintenance? Why aren't we better able to police domestic violence cases? What police-review agency can we set up to make sure this never happens again?

The guilty party in each case would be ostracized, branded, photographed ducking into court hearings. The tabloids would speak of "Drunk Lazy Loafers," the "Husband-Stealing Black Widow," and the "Trigger-Happy Supercops." There will be scapegoating and calls for justice (meaning calls for vengeance). Families will be encouraged to file civil suits for all sorts of things that should have been done and would have been done if this depraved person had not been involved.

And yet for the most part that's not how it's covered overseas. They're just as likely to do the opposite story:

1. "For the rest of his life, Vittorio Vincenza will see the faces of the children. He'll wake up in the middle of the night, sweating profusely, his tortured bruised soul unable to cope with the enormity of his fate. He'll always be the man who let the children die, the man who didn't fix the brakes."

2. "Sophia Aruna Carreras has thought about the convent. She's considered it often. She longs for a place where she'll never again be touched by a man. She goes to the cathedral twice a day and lights a candle for her friend, who died without knowing of her betrayal. Sometimes she imagines blood on her hands."

3. "The Commander paces the small headquarters room of his lonely post on the Uraguayan border. He has a few books, a picture of his family, an ashtray full of cigar ash, but he has no medals or commendations or photos on the wall from his years as the triumphant comrade of presidents and diplomats. 'I think about it every day,' he says tersely. 'Of course I do.'"

If we were to name this genre of news reporting, I would call it the Guilt-Ridden Victim of Fate story. In this universe, the man who failed to act, or who pulled the trigger when he shouldn't have, is considered just as tragic as the person who lost his life. It's not a "Who Can We Punish?" story, but a "Fate Catches Up to Everyone" story.

It's assumed, in other words, that anyone who makes a tragic mistake ending in death is haunted and cursed in a much more profound way than simply worrying about jail or a lawsuit or media exposure. Of course, these countries do all the same things we do here--there is an investigation, and a court-martial, and a lawsuit. But that's a minor part of the coverage.

I'm not sure exactly why we're so hung up on the purely regulatory and punitive aspects of these stories. After all, isn't it an inherently more dramatic story when it has irony and ambiguity? Shouldn't it have at least two sides? Isn't the fact that it has no easy answers what makes it a good story in the first place?

I suppose you could come up with cultural reasons for the difference. Older cultures tend to believe in Fate more than we do. They tend to believe that man's destiny is his destiny, and there's nothing he can do to change it. Americans really don't believe that. They believe that destiny can be cut off by the actions of other people, and that this is always a crime, even when it's an accident. (Notice how often we prosecute parents for murder when they accidentally kill their own children.)

Or there could be a more technical reason for it. We have armies of plaintiffs' attorneys in this country who file lawsuits at the drop of a hat, and always file when a death is involved, regardless of whether it was an accident or not. They hold press conferences. They make statements. It becomes news because it's in our face all the time.

Or perhaps there's something even scarier going on. Perhaps we're the first fateless society. Perhaps we've internalized the philosophy of Marx and Engels, and we believe that there is no God, everything is deterministic, every bad result has a cause, and our duty as citizens is to find that cause and root it out. Perhaps we're all closet communists, who believe that all fates are within our control and all destinies should be equal. Perhaps we're that deluded.

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