I reckon that if the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans hadn’t found a landscape so heavily excavated, leveled, dredged, deforested, and plundered, its effects might have been less catastrophic. I think everyone agrees. But the point where the debate begins is whether a hurricane here and a tsunami there are due to global warming. Let me make it clear: though I have no specific scientific knowledge, I’m convinced that changes in environmental conditions are producing phenomena that wouldn’t have happened if we were more concerned about the fate of the planet, and I’m therefore in favor of the Kyoto Protocol. But there have always been tornadoes, cyclones, and typhoons—otherwise we wouldn’t have Joseph Conrad’s magnificent descriptions, or those famous disaster movies.
There have been many cataclysms in past centuries that have killed tens of thousands of people, perhaps happening as close together as the tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina in America. A few have been described in writing, such as the earthquakes in Pompeii and Lisbon, while vague and terrifying news circulated about others, such as the eruption of Krakatoa. But all in all, I think it’s fair to say that hundreds of other cataclysms have wiped out coastlines and populations while we were otherwise occupied. In the globalized world, the speed of information is such that we hear immediately about every tragic event in the remotest corner of the globe, and we are under the impression that there are now many more cataclysms than there used to be.
For example, I think the average television viewer must wonder whether some mysterious virus is causing mothers to murder their children. And here it’s difficult to blame the hole in the ozone layer. There has to be something else beneath it. Indeed, there is something else, but it’s as plain as can be, and there’s nothing secret about it. Quite simply, infanticide has existed throughout history, and it was fairly widely practiced. Thousands of years back, the ancient Greeks went to the theater to cry over Medea, who as we know killed her children to spite her husband. We should nevertheless be comforted by the fact that out of seven billion inhabitants on the planet, the percentage of killer mothers has many zeros before it, and so we shouldn’t look suspiciously on every mother who passes us with a stroller.
Yet anyone watching the television news has the impression that we live in one of the circles of hell where not only do mothers kill a baby a day, but fourteen-year-olds are going around shooting, foreigners raping, shepherds cutting off ears, fathers exterminating their families, sadists injecting bleach into mineral water bottles, and fond nephews slicing up their uncles and aunts. It’s all true, of course, and within the statistical norm, and no one chooses to remember those serial killers in the halcyon years following World War II: the Soapmaker of Correggio who boiled her neighbors, Rina Fort who smashed the heads of her lover’s children with a flatiron, and Countess Pia Bellentani who disrupted the dinners of VIPs with gunfire.
Now, while it’s “almost” normal that a mother kills her child from time to time, it’s less normal for so many Americans and Iraqis to be blown up every day. And yet we know all about the children who are killed but very little about the number of dead adults. Serious newspapers devote several pages to political problems, economics, and culture, and others to the stock market, classified ads, and those death notices our grandparents used to read so avidly—and then, apart from exceptional cases, the papers devote just a few inside pages to crime stories. Indeed, at one time they gave more summary coverage than today, so that bloodthirsty readers had to buy specialty crime magazines, in the same way, let’s not forget, that they left television gossip for the illustrated weeklies found in hairdressing salons.
Today, however, after the right amount of news coverage on wars, mass killings, terrorist attacks, and suchlike, after a few judicious revelations on political affairs, but without unduly disturbing viewers, our television news bulletins move on to a sequence of crimes, matri-sorori-uxori-fratri-infanticides, robberies, kidnappings, shootings, and, for good measure, each day it seems heaven’s cataracts have opened wide upon our regions and the rain has poured as never before, in comparison to which the Great Flood was a minor plumbing incident.
And there’s something beneath this, or above it. The editors of our television bulletins, not wanting to compromise themselves too much with politically and economically dangerous news, prefer to stick to crime stories. A fine sequence of heads split open with a hatchet keeps the public satisfied, doesn’t put bad ideas into their minds.
2005