TRANSCRIPT

Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

A lot of ink has been spilled about the death of “the news.” The olden days when a Walter Cronkite-like figure closed his nightly news broadcasts with the valediction, “and that’s the way it is,” and the rest of us could nod in agreement at having been informed about what was happening in the world and drift off into a satisfied sleep are, well, long gone. In those days, there were only a few news broadcasts, “information” in those days was limited to the things a select few decided were worth sharing, and the majority of folks moved through the world with the same ideas about what was factual, real, or true.

Now, instead of a media monoculture, we have something more akin to a mycelial ecosystem: rhizomatic, recursive, and alive, but also prone to infection, distortion, and runaway growth. Everyone gets to have a say, but no one gets vetted. This sounds dangerous, and perhaps it is; but that idea also skips over the question of who gets the right, and responsibility, to do the vetting. This shift has occurred across every form of media–television, music, literature, film–as social media and digital media making have significantly minimized the cost of entry while expanding the reach of our own individual soap box platforms.

For 25 years, between 1980 and 2005, Ted Koppel, anchored the national nightly newsmagazine “Nightline” as another of those singular, monocultural voices. The early 1980s were a moment not too unlike our own: shifting immigration laws unsettled something long buried, lit a spark that continues to burn like wildfire. Ongoing unrest in the Middle East placed diplomatic pressure on the U.S. to protect what it saw as its own interests in the region. On September 20, 1982, President Reagan addressed the nation, calling for an end to the cycle of massacres taking place then in Beirut, and seeking to justify the deployment of U.S. forces into Lebanon. 

In 1982, the nightly news had no Comments Section, which, most folks agree, could use less polyvocal certainty. But what we did have then, as now, was poetry. 

Poetry can drive us not just to see things anew, but to act upon what we see. Our bodies are already acting out their response–our heart rate pulses more quickly, our palms get a bit sweaty, we suddenly need to DO SOMETHING about a fact that had previously gone unseen or unacknowledged. The poem then can make the unseen no longer unseeable.

Today’s poem reminds me of the power of poetry to comment, to respond, to shed light and offer us space to form our own impressions of what the facts may mean. To decide, then, with the knowledge provided by our very own bodies, what we mean to do about it.

Nightline: September 20, 1982
by June Jordan

“I know it’s an unfortunate way to say it, but
do you think you can put this massacre 
on the back burner now?”

“Nightline: September 20, 1982” from DIRECTED BY DESIRE: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JUNE JORDAN, Copper Canyon Press © Christopher D. Meyer, 2007. Reprinted by permission of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.