I have tried to avoid the religious threads in the past week as this was not a time to be provocative, but am I the only one to find the wall-to-wall coverage of the pope’s death and funeral to be a little bit over the top??
It’s a big story because everybody thinks it is a big story and wants to be part of a big story, thus making it a big story…
Below the fold, some extracts of two articles published in yestarday’s Guardian which provide some much needed perspective.
With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome.
The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its front-page headlines, “Safe in Heaven” and the next day “Amen”. Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing. Poor old Prince Rainier of that squalid little tax haven missed his full Hello! death rites through bad timing.
The arcane flummery brings forth dusty academics in Vaticanology, the Act of Settlement and laws of Monegasque succession. These pantomimes of power fascinate in their quaintness, but they signify nothing beyond momentary frisson.
The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald no resurgence of Catholicism. The devout are there, but this is essentially a Diana moment, a Queen Mother’s catafalque. People queue to join great public spectacles, hoping it’s a tell-my-grandchildren event. Communing with public emotion is easy now travel is cheap. These things are driven by rolling, unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.
(…)
The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy. It has weak temporal power, so George Bush can safely pray at the corpse of the man who criticised the Iraq war and capital punishment; it simply didn’t matter as the Pope never made a serious issue of it or ordered the US church to take strong action.
The Vatican’s deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today’s immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms – this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.
(…)
At the funeral will be a convocation of mullahs, rabbis and all the other medieval faiths that increasingly conspire together against modernity. Islamic groups are sternly warning the Vatican to stand firm against liberal influences on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. What is it about religion that unites them all on sex? It always expresses itself as disgust for women’s bodies, leading to a need to suppress women altogether. Why is controlling women’s bodies the shared battle flag of every faith?
(With a specific nod to lorraine and her series on the body)
The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications that take no account of how the world and people change.
(…)
The retrospectives that draw a line between his first visit home as Pope in 1979, the rise of Solidarity a year later and the collapse of the one-party system in 1989 are especially open to question.
They ignore martial law, which stopped Solidarity in its tracks and emasculated it for most of the 1980s. It was a defeat of enormous proportions that John Paul could not reverse until the real power-holders in eastern Europe, the men who ran the Kremlin, changed their line.
(…)
[At the 1981 Solidarity congress], all sides agonised over whether and how Moscow would intervene. There were already strong hints that the Polish army would be used rather than Soviet tanks. None of us thought a clamp-down could be avoided. Within weeks we were proved right. The Kremlin got its way with relative ease. Poland’s own communist authorities arrested thousands of Solidarity’s leaders and drove the rest underground.
John Paul’s reaction was soft. Armed resistance was not a serious option, but there were Poles who favoured mass protests, factory occupations and a campaign of civil disobedience. The Pope disappointed them. He criticised martial law but warned of bloodshed and civil war, counselling patience rather than defiance.
(…)
The impetus for Gorbachev’s reforms was not external pressure from the west, dissent in eastern Europe or the Pope’s calls to respect human rights, but economic stagnation in the Soviet Union and internal discontent within the Soviet elite.
(…)
John Paul also opposed liberation theology because he saw priests defy their bishops and challenge the church’s hierarchical structure. Even while communism still held power in Europe, he had more in common with it than many of his supporters admit. He recentralised power in the Vatican and reversed the perestroika of his predecessor-but-two John XXIII, who had given more say to local dioceses.
With the fall of “international communism”, the Vatican was left as the only authoritarian ideology with global reach. There was no let-up in the Pope’s pressures against dissent, the worst example being his excommunication of Sri Lanka’s Father Tissa Balasuriya in 1997, an impish figure who questioned the cult of Mary as a docile, submissive icon and argued that, as a minority religion in Asia, Catholicism had to be less arrogant towards other faiths.
The Pope could not accept that challenge to the Vatican’s absolutism. So it is fitting that he will be buried in the crypt from which John XXIII was removed, symbolically marking the primacy of Wojtyla’s conservative era over the liberal hopes of an earlier generation.
My position on religion is simple. Faith is an individual act which I fully respect. Churches as political institutions are extraordinarily dangerous because they bring the deathly ingredient of absolutes into human affairs, and absolute are an all-too-easy way to get to “the ends justify the means”, as the ends, being of a “magic”, or “transcendental” nature, are always superior to whatever consequences they can have in the real, imperfect world of humans.
So, I don’t care for the pope.
You are definitely not the only one who found the coverage over the top. I agree that the story was both parasite and host. There’s always the tendency to forget the deceased’s weak points and focus only on the good and I think we’ve seen that carried out quite well by the large-scale media outfits. I’m just grateful it’s over now, but for the appointing of a new pope. I pray they pick a healthy one so we don’t have to go through all this hoopla again anytime soon.
Thankfully, Jerome didn’t have to live through the death of Ronald Reagan. It got so bad, I told my daughter I’d be thrilled to see a news story about Laci Peterson!
There’s this from the first Guardian piece: “The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves.” I find that very amusing since, this past week, to get away from the incessant coverage on U.S. TV and radio, I ran to BBC World Service because they continued to cover worldwide events and news. (So, I find that criticism a bit unfair, or perhaps the author was referring to BBC TV? Or perhaps it’s just that the author didn’t have U.S. TV coverage against which to compare the BBC.)
I get the impression that the news services — particularly the cable 24/7 news services such as CNN, FOX, and MSNBC — were terrified to go away from the pope story. They probably think that every Catholic is going to tune in and, if they’re not talking Pope 24/7, the Catholic will switch to another channel.
(One of the most absurd outcomes of cable news TV’s mad dash to cover “breaking stories” is that often there’s nothing for a TV camera to see. To wit: The plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and sister-in-law. For hour after hour, all CNN could show was the surface of the water or aerial shots of the Kennedy family compound. That was it! Nothing but lapping ocean water. WTF.
Then there was the MASS exodus of TV reporters and anchorpeople to Rome. … BIll Maher had a CNN program host on his HBO show last night, and quipped that he had to ask that host since he was the only CNN TV person left who wasn’t in Rome.
Yes, oui, si. Thank you for saying what I’ve been thinking. And Polly Toynbee is a wonderful columnist (it truly was “a Diana moment”).
I looked this morning at the slide show on the NYTimes site and thought, How very strange. All those old men in fancy skirts who have spent their lives suppressing dissent, inquiry, and change. And while I felt sorry for the grief of people whose crying faces were photographed in the square, I felt nothing of it myself.
All that time and effort and money to bury one old man. How many could have been fed or clothed or housed for the same amounts? And at the end, they put the fancy coffin into a hole in the cellar, where it will decompose and rot, just as institutional religion does.
For more than a week I haven’t read the newspapers’ first 4 pages and I stopped listening to the radio. I even avoided to plug my electric shaver in for fear of hearing another hagiographic comment…
I find the marketing of agony displayed by the Catholic Chuch utterly disgusting, and I know a few catholics who feel the same.
It may drag out until the 20th of April when a new Pope is chosen. Then there will be every item of his biography highlighted and repeated by every major news source.
Pope John Paul II’s myth has been established.
One thing did occur to me, did the news media cross the line and break the first commandment? Was this adulation more like adoration?
In the meantime, the killing in Iraq continues…
“Pope John Paul II’s myth has been established.”
Great observation, Sybil.
P.S. 15 Iraqi policemen were killed today.
once these myths have been established, it is almost impossible to replace them with the truth. How do the myths get established – endless repetition. Like the Reagan-worship last summer, whose purpose was to firmly establish that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and destroyed the only real nuclear threat to the US, and restored the US economy to health and vigor with trickle-down economics after we had been brought to our economic knees by that terrible Carter person.
Message – Republicans keep us safe from outside threats and make us financially successful.
And now, they are the ones who appreciate and respect how wonderful this pope was, with his strong moral message protecting us from sexual degeneracy (homosexuals, of course, but also any non-procreative sex). And of course, it was this pope and our Beloved Reagan who destroyed the Evil Empire.
So yes, I suspect that this is far from over.
In art history we have the myth of Picasso. Myth does not really mean lie. It is fantasy built around a kernel of truth.
Maybe the right word is ‘legend.’
You are right about how history fails to correct the legends and myths.
Thankfully, that won’t have as many visuals, so there may not be as much of a crush. I’ve known people who covered pope selections in pre-total TV days, and they spent most of their time sitting around in Roman bars, waiting for something to happen. Kind of dull, they said, but lots of drinking and piano-playing.
There will be black smoke coming from the chimney and then white smoke meaning ‘the world has a pope.’ CNN will have a live cam on that chimney 24/7. Wanna bet?
It’ll be like the live cam on the ocean off the Vineyard post JFK Jr. I guess that’s what you do for coverage when you don’t have any real reporters, just talking hairdos.
I remember hearing a report on NPR quite a while ago about how the major media outlets were in the process of renting apartments and hotel rooms with a clear view of the Vatican, knowing that the Pope would pass away eventually and they needed to be prepared to get the shot. This was literally at least a year ago, probably more. They were driving rents up in the area, so intent were most of the media to hold onto the place as long as necessary.
Kind of a sick twist on those death pools, huh?
main trouble being, imho, the things that were not reported or were given short shrift, e.g., the 14 americans killed in a helicopter crash in iraq or the four children killed by a hidden bomb meant for someone else.
of course, teevee needs something visual, so the pope (and michael jackson) get all the time coverage.
i’ve got a feeling the pope wouldn’t like this.
To ignore other news is always a bad thing, and it’s certainly a trend we’ve been on to deflect from the other news. However compare the 2 weeks of Terri Schiavo to the one week of the Pope. Also keep in mind that there are 1 billion Catholics – that’s a big chunk of the people on this planet and they need to be catered to. The guardian is not the most neutral observer in all of this, but as I said at the beginning it should not be at the cost of other information.
I’ll add a rather unpopular gripe of my own here: I think 15 minutes of sports coverage is too much for a 1/2 hour news show. Go to ESPN.
15 minutes? Where do you live, Hanni? I read recently that sports coverage on 1/2 hour TV news has gone down to about 2-3 minutes tops. That’s about what the Seattle TV news stations give to sports … except when there’s a huge story about a local sports team.
You make great points in comparing the Schiavo circus to the Pope coverage, and the rather large difference in the number of affected.
Also: While I avoided almost all the coverage, there were a couple times I watched and became riveted … when they talked about the Pope’s life and his very difficult years in Poland. What a story.
P.S. Bill Maher spent about half his show last night skewering ALL of it.
You’re right of course – I don’t watch mainstream news so the comment was perhaps a bit archaic. I get most off the internet – UK and Germany. To continue on the perspective this was a leader who’s been popular and around for 25 years – there are several that are around for 1/2 that time, but none really match him (I’m discounting dictators of course).
Yes I saw Maher last night, but then not only is he an atheist he hates religion. I’m not knocking him just stating the obvious.
that appalls me. (Oh, why am I still appalled by any of this?)
It looks to me like pandering to Catholics – not respect for their religious leader. Catholics in the US have in the past been fanatically anti-Communist and of course, their views on sexual issues are in line with the Protestant fundamentalists, who have already been co-opted and are being used by the neo-cons (who I think, have no religious values of their own) quite effectively for their power grab. But many Catholics still vote Democrat – perhaps because many Catholics have strong roots in the Labor movement.
Now the neo-cons want all of the Catholic vote too. So here comes the Republican homage to the pope – with the rewrite of history about how he was instrumental in defeating Communism, as if he made the Solidarity movement happen, and in turn, that defeated Communism. And Bush flying off to the funeral. And the media playing along.
It’s not about respect for the faith of a billion people. It’s a cynical manipulation of that faith to gain even more political power.
It’s of course hard for me to understand the dynamics at play with American Catholics. I grew up in a large Catholic country (Austria), which also is a very socially liberal country. There the popes teachings were never really obeyed or discussed. Basically you can sin as much as you want then go to confession and do the whole thing over. This to me is the Catholic mindset. For the record my father is a Catholic (active) and my mother an atheist – and we were raised atheist. I never experienced the intolerance I do here because of my non-beliefs – but my run ins are mostly with Protestants. The Catholics in this area (Mass) are also rather liberal. Now I understand that the impact of the Catholic Church in South America and Africa is medieval, but we can also blame our government for that in that our aid is conditional in regards to birth control and such. A secular government vs. a religious institution hmm. Who’s more of a hypocrite?
The vote grab has a lot more to do with education people receive than what religion they follow. Look at the Kennedys, Mario Cuomo etc..
Also it’s not about political power, it’s about political influence.
beyond what I know from being Catholic and attending Catholic schools in the 60’s. (I am what they would call a “lapsed Catholic” now, or what I would call an atheist.)
But Catholics were by and large solid Dems for a long time, I think due to the fact that the largest American Catholic groups, especially the Irish and Italians, were immigrants that were discriminated against and therefore poor working class in the main. Which led to their being very committed union organizers and members, and aligned with the Democrats – which was seen as the party of Labor – through most of the mid-20th century. Latinos, mostly Catholic and still discriminated against immigrants, still vote Democrat. For example, here in Texas, the state went to Bush in a landslide to no one’s surprise. Except, the counties along the Mexican border were solidly blue.
Although some Catholics here and worldwide embrace progressive policies because they reflect Jesus’ admonitions to help the poor (eg liberation theology), I don’t think that is a major influence in the average US Catholic voter. Instead, as labor unions have lost power here, and the European Catholic immigrants of a century ago have been assimilated and moved into the middle class, the connection between Catholics and Labor has weakened. Now they are more likely to be swayed by appeals to “save us from the moral decay” of homosexuality and pre/extramarital sex, birth control and abortion.
Republicans are see an opportunity here and are exploiting it for all its worth – fawning all over the same pope that they were ridiculing and attacking a couple of years ago when he expressed his opposition to the Iraq invasion.
And yes, fundamentalist Protestants seem to be a lot harder on us atheists than Catholics, in my experience. The former see us as dangerous and evil. The latter seem to think we should be pitied, or that we are just peculiar.
I’ll take peculiar anyday!
Right on. The Catholic vote is complex. As a well trained Catholic, I was taught from infancy the maxim “we are our brothers’ keepers.” How could that ever fit into the sociopathic neo-con agenda?
Why is it that fundies in every religion are obsessed with sex and force people to wear things? Catholic women were not allowed in church without a head covering until Vatican II.
Yes, religion is being exploited by political extremists.
By the way, Reagan did knock down the Berlin wall. It had nothing to do with the economic collapse in the Soviet Union or Chernobyl. It was dear leader Reagan saying in his best Hollywood annunciation: “Knock down that wall, Mr. Gorbychev.” </sarcasm>
the devil ara YOU ALL complaining about. Try living over here in Italy for a little while, please!!! Someone metnoned TV….there were at least four documentaries on the major stations. There are two documdramas scheduled to be shown tonight, competing head-to-head on Raiuno and Raudue (or Canale 5 or whatever the heck)…4 billion people went to worship this golden media calf. It’s absolutley exraordinary and unprecendeted in recorded history.
Its’ not all or not only the Pope and the Churche’s fault, however. It’s the Italian people and, perhaps, all of Western civilization which is being increasingly based on into what the philosopher Umberto Galimberti calls, in this week’s Espresso, “an infantile religiosity which requires the great man,the great personage” in order to give it sense and order in an chaotic and unordered universe.
He goes on to call it “the desecration of the sacred which requires interiority” etc… I’m not religious so I don’t follow him in that direction and I think the instinct to built up famous human beings out of all proportion (happens on the left too, BTW—JFK, FDR, MLK) is something that goes very very far back in to our evolutionary past.
(if any) to Umberto Galimberti’s essay? Er, is it in English?
“Desecration of the sacred, which reqires interiority” — oh, I love phrase.
In part, he’s talking about all the pomp and circumstance, and the public, in-your-face consumption of it, as opposed to reflecting, seriously, on the nature o faith, both in immediate, personal terms and what faith can and should bring to the world.
(and by faith, you can substitute spirituality, not Christian faith, necesssarily)
Just turn the tv off.
I don’t watch it, outside of DVD’s I rent and public access. Thus I’m not offended by their parade of idiocy.
I suppose it’s something like what happened when Princess Di Died, though.
Money talks, and folks watch what they wanna watch.
I saw an interesting, if inaccurate point in one of Polly’s quotes you provided.
Most religous sects take the loss of seminal fluid as being a loss of essential life force, whether they state it directly or not.
There’s also a few groups, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, and even a couple isolated Christians that practice sacred sexuality. The belief is that the, pardon my french, “little death” of orgasm is a state on par with deepest meditation with regard to contact to the universal consciousness. Ritual is used to build the essential energy within the (multi-orgasmic) woman to it’s highest peak, then release it back to the man, thereby increasing the vital energy of them both.
The man’s orgasm, of course, is intended to be non-ejaculatory to preserve his vital fluids.
In reference to the Christian Body Taboo in particular, it stems from a misunderstanding.
In fact, if you read Genesis without prejudice, you’ll see that God was angry that they were naked, he wasn’t even angry that they ate the fruit. He had to do what he had to do (kick they ass to the curb) as a natural karmic consequence. A creature with true consciousness, (as opposed to the naive bliss of an animal mind), cannot dwell in the garden of eden. They were ashamed of their own nakedness, God didn’t tell them that it had to be that way, but there was nothing he could do to fix it at that point.
Plus you’ve got the fact that, if they would have then eaten from the Tree of Life, they’d be just like God.
This is all right there in the book, BTW, look it up for yourself.
What Genesis teaches us is that
Leave a fiver in the plate on your way out, thanks.
That should, of course read, “god wasn’t angry”.
I have been calling it the “Pope-a-thon” – all Pope, all the Time…I think in part it is a creation of the 24 hour news cycle, but as a secular person, I am really, truly sick of it.
Thanks Jérôme for bringing this up. I am so fed up with this political circus. I can not see what this show had to do with religion or spirituality, it was pure propaganda for politicians. I felt offended by headlines like “the whole world mourns for the pope”? Gosh, am I a not a part of this world. I didn’t mourn him, though I am glad he was released from his suffering. I never felt touched by him, I never felt him to be a guiding light to humanity. So I am glad part of the show is over and I hope they truly will elect a shepherd, someone who cares for humanity and the world.
I agree but I respect the needs of people for this adulation. I don’t understand adulation but I respect that millions of people have a need for it. That would be an interesting study.
Was this really a mirror for the peoples need for adulation? I am not sure of that. I could respect that. However, for me this funeral has been misused for political propaganda which had nothing to do with adulation, but more with manipulation.
I was thinking of all the actual people mourning and weeping not the media manipulation of their grief.
TV lives on melodrama, celebrity, and scandal.
Was the pope coverage over the top? Absolutely, and it demonstrates–again–the complete bankruptcy of TV as a newsource. Only on those rare occasions when the WTC is collapsing, for example, does TV coverage intersect with newsworthiness. But then, a stopped watch tells the correct time every twelve hours.
To say, “Turn it off” is fine for you and me, but does nothing to mitigate the effects of this mass sentimentality on the billions of people whose only source of news is television.
Thanks, Jerome, for bringing this up.
What’s it matter, though?
They reap what they sow, and they’re most likely happy with what they have. What “effects” are you worried about? That someone, somewhere, might become a Christian? That they might think the pope was a good person? They may feel a little deeper or cry a little more?
The simple fact is that folks are fascinated, and the media reflects that. Media is not a beast that has transformed the populace into a mindless bunch of zombies.
People have always been a mindless bunch of zombies, by and large. TV has merely filled a void.
There’s not a damn thing you can do about elevating their condition, outside of providing a positive example.
If you don’t like it, turn it off. It’s what the people want to see, or it wouldn’t be there.
Even this communication I recognize as ultimately futile.
I can’t free you from your concern about the effects of mass sentimentality on the billions of people who choose TV as their news source any more than you can free those people from their assumedly inferior condition.
Fuck them, I say, and feed em fish heads. Work on keeping libraries free with free internet access for all and hope folks get the chance to use em.
If Santa don’t want the cookies, sure, I’ll eat em.
Usually, I’m the cynical voice in the crowd.
But surely it does matter, and surely both of us (see our sigs), despite all the evidence to the contrary, still cling to the dream of a better world, and of course both of us understand that in many cases the media’s servicing of the people’s love for mass mental masturbation is harmless enough… but the cumulative effects, as evidenced in last year’s presidential election, are toxic, and must be denounced, whatever the chances for change.
And now, I need to go inside, out of this wind, and wipe the spittal off my face.
Cheers.
since it was just the latest example of wall-to-wall coverage that (a) to a large degree defined how we were SUPPOSED to view it, and (b) crowded out so much other news.
I had my 9th graders examine the effects of w-2-w tv coverage. Some looked at other events, as well.
Some, Africa-American, were angry that the life and death of Jonny Cochran got short shrift, between Terri Schiavo and the Pope. Some pointed at events in Iraq that were blotted out, others pointed to other stories here at home.
It was interesting to see how many, even among those not particularly academically oriented, resented being manipulated by what was being covered.
FWIW
thanks jerome for this diary. Good place to finally get out my frustration again at cable entertainment who pretend to be news organizations. I haven’t even been able to watch Keith Olberman these last few weeks. For supposedly being a humble man this whole spectacle is just vulgar and in poor taste to my way of thinking. Like anything else this could have been completely covered without blacking out all other news but then cable isn’t about news anymore but entertainment and high drama.
I’m sure by now everyone who has been watching believes the guy to be a saint. Forget the absence of leadership on the whole pedophile priests scandal that rocked the viewers and catholics alike. Forget that the pope continued to believe women were second class citizens and anyone who can say gays are evil simply can not qualify as a saint of any kind.
The only bit of good news I’ve read is that apparently Bush was booed by some in the crowd at this whole circus. And that Clinton was greeted with pretty much open arms again when he went out walking several times in Rome. While bush of course is under lock/key.