HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Murphy and Steinfels

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Whither the Weather?

By Cullen Murphy
Posted Monday, Feb. 15, 1999, at 11:04 AM ET

It is one of those razor-sharp mornings in Boston, and I've just returned from a walk up to Copp's Hill, a few blocks from the office. (The graveyard on the summit is where Cotton Mather spins.) The air almost tinkles with frost, and the sun has begun to turn all the red brick in this neighborhood into gold.

RSS

I had been hoping for something of a Fresh Start, and must confess to being pretty satisfied with the launch thus far. Yesterday's impeachment wrap-ups on television and in the papers had a forlorn and dutiful quality to them. (Fine!) The front page of today's New York Times is almost awash in normality--Balkan ethnic strife, Israeli religious strife, U.S. labor strife, urban street-gang strife. It's one of those front pages whose facsimile will seem vaguely disappointing when given to someone as a birthday several decades from now. ("I wonder who 'Albright' was," someone will ask.)

Do you ever think about what the peaks and valleys of the news would have looked like last year if the biggest story of all hadn't been sitting heavily on top of the terrain like a glacial ice sheet? I got a strange inkling of that experience a few months ago while waiting to appear on a television show. Each TV set in the green room was showing a different morning news program, and one of the programs seemed weirdly out of place--imagine if your lurid local news show had suddenly been hijacked by the editors of The Economist. There were in-depth stories about economic implosion in Russia, about the aging of the population in the industrialized world, about the growing importance of Islam in the West. The explanation came soon enough in the form of a telltale "oot" (as in "that's aboot all the time we have"): The program was coming from the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

One story we probably would have heard a lot more about is just the plain old weather. The mayhem caused by rogue weather events this past year has been extraordinary, and tragic, and under normal media circumstances might even have brought some sustained attention to the perennial snooze issue of long-term climate change. As it was, the chief fact I've taken away from the weather news of recent months is that El Niño has now been joined by something called La Niña. This is a bad sign: It means that we can expect similar-sounding weather names to proliferate indefinitely ahead into the next century. La Cucaracha? (Small but recurring weather pattern you can't get eradicate.) Los Alamos? (Weather system that blows everything else away, although La Cucaracha will no doubt survive it.) La Guardia? (I'm open to suggestions.) Anyway, I'd be interested in your views on the stories that would have been big stories had it not been for The Story.

Also, did you read this morning about the discovery in Miami of the 500-year-old remains--essentially, a pattern of post holes--of some sort of Tequesta Indian structure, during excavations for a modern building on the shores of Biscayne Bay? The structure was apparently circular, so you knew it wouldn't be long before someone began speculating that it must have been an "ancient observatory," like Shea Stadium.

And a report on National Public Radio indicates that the prime minister of Australia wants to incorporate an affirmation of the existence of God into the proposed new preamble of the Australian constitution. I hope Gary Bauer doesn't hear about this.