Vying for media attention these days, often neck-and-neck, we find the public self-immolation of actor Charlie Sheen and what seems to be a genuine people’s revolution in Libya.
The modern American revolutionary Abbie Hoffman, upon returning from a decade of living underground – mostly in northern New York State, where he worked as a cook – and taking back up his public role as gadfly and pot-stirrer, remarked that “you can’t be a revolutionary in America without watching a lot of TV. That’s where America lives.”
This was certainly truer when Hoffman spoke these works, when most cities had a dozen channels for viewers to choose among, and the “Big Three” networks were minting money through their media oligopoly. Times are certainly different, but the two sides of the Sheen/Libya coin suggest that the mainstream media are either appealing at once to two remarkably divergent publics, or that thoughtful people have an appetite for compelling if ultimately trivial self-destructive behavior, while the consumers of mindless drivel also care to at least some tiny degree about democracy, human aspiration, and the fate of the world.
If Sheen is a minor Greek god caught mid-fall from Olympus, Libya is the famine or the war taking place closer at hand to the Greek demos. The real and the unreal. The fantastic and the mundane. The distracting and the truly horrifying. We are entertained with the worst kind of voyeuristic circus. And we are offered a glimpse of history’s propulsive force, of human dignity fighting for its life. We seem, as a society to want both stories to be told to us in more or less the place, at more or less the same time.
We seem – as a culture – unable take only part of the sphere of stories that arches over us. Yet each of us can choose to stand closer to this fragment, this figment, this corner of the story-telling world, than that one. We can fight our way over to the meaning of sacrifice, revolution and hope, and claim that bit of space, or we can be buffeted from here to there, be fed the news others want to feed us.
Our choice is not so much which battle to fight, but which battle to watch.
Trivial as that might seem, it’s a choice that matters.
The.American.Word. 
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A family friend who is an Iranian living in the U.S. said that the focus of the news media on the large anti-government protests in Iran in 2009 was giving the protesters a great voice. That is, until Michael Jackson’s death in June. Media attention immediately swung away from Iran, and the bottom dropped out from the protest movement.