The Rise of Weather Wimpiness
Floyd is making me believe more strongly in a Divine
Power: From the moment yesterday that I professed to you my belief that acts of
God are now invariably overhyped, this one began heading directly toward
metropolitan New York--toward me, I'm thinking, and my flip, callow hubris. The
kids' school canceled classes at 6:45 this morning, which has led me in turn to
try to weasel out of a book-reading-and-signing I'm supposed to do tonight. I
do think people are bigger weather wimps today than they were when we were
kids. (Canceling school because of rain?) But then, I was a kid in Omaha,
Nebraska, where weather wimpiness was literally unthinkable. In fact, extreme
weather is the most interesting part of life in Nebraska. (Extreme weather and,
briefly, when I was 4, Charles Starkweather, the real-life serial-murderer
Martin Sheen played in Badlands .) The one time, around 1967, that a
tornado actually touched down in our yard--a little tornado, but still--I was
away at summer camp. I have never regretted missing any event more.
There's an idea for a new cable channel: Weather
Planet!, a cooler, next-generation Weather Channel that would broadcast nothing
but radar and video images of extreme weather from all over the world--heavy
snow, flash floods, golf-ball-size hail, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes,
cyclones, temperatures less than zero or more than 100. As long as you're in
Los Angeles, why don't you go ahead and sell the idea this afternoon to Barry
Diller or Rupert Murdoch or somebody. We'll split the money.
Tomorrow's headlines today: Although the story may not
have appeared in the Los Angeles edition of the New
York Times being placed right now outside the door of your splendid suite
at the Peninsula, 8,668 of the New York grade-schoolers who were informed last
spring they'd flunked, and had to take remedial summer courses, did not in fact
flunk. The tests were incorrectly scored by the private firm that gave them.
(You really would think that if a giant public-school system could do one thing
itself, aside from installing metal detectors, it would be to administer a
standardized test.) How many hours until one of those kid's families file suit
against the city for emotional distress?
And I'll bet the Times
national edition didn't include the story about the special new millennium
commemorative-edition manhole covers ConEd is installing. They have a 3-D
psychedelic pattern--the Manhole Cover of the Future, circa about 1972. At a
press conference, someone asked the ConEd guy if the swirly new Op Art
underfoot might not dangerously addle drunks stumbling through the gutters of
Times Square--a splendid old-fashioned kind of Hildy Johnson question, I
thought.
I know, I know what you're thinking: Enough with the
obsessive-compulsive glimpses of the old days.
OK, here's something wholly new: the Beavis and
Butt-headification of society at every stratum. Yesterday I happened to meet a
top executive of a huge, ultra-Establishment corporation, a
conservative-looking middle-aged man in a suit and tie, who described certain
Web sites as "sucky." "They suck," he also said. His language inclined me to
like him. But it was mildly shocking, as if my mother were to call me tonight
and tell me she thought Action was "totally
awesome."
Since this is our last day, and Action premieres tonight, we won't be able to discuss its merits
here, and whether you think it's true in its depiction of Hollywood. But
reading the reviews of the show in the paper this morning, I wondered: Do you
have your own ghastliest-show-business-moment? I'll bet you do.
