Austin Bay nails it:
In December 2004, I wrote a column that led with this line: “Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt.”
The column placed the January 2005 Palestinian and Iraqi elections in historical context. These were not the revolutions of generals with tanks and terrorists with fatwas, but the slow revolutions of the ballot box, with political moderates and liberal reformers the genuinely revolutionary vanguard. To massage Churchill’s phrase, these revolts were the beginning of democratic politics, where “jaw jaw” begins to replace “war war” and “terror terror.”
These slow revolts against tyranny and terror continue, and are the “big story” of 2005 and the truly “big history” of our time.
Partisan, ignorant, fear-filled rhetoric tends to obscure this big history, in part because the big story moves slowly. The democratic revolt is grand drama, but it doesn’t cram into a daily news cycle, much less into “news updates” every 30 minutes.
Television, the medium where image is a tyrant, finds incremental economic and political development a particularly frustrating story to tell. A brick is visually boring — a bomb is not. The significance of a brick takes time to explain, time to establish context, while a spectacular explosion incites immediate visceral and emotional responses. In the long term, hope may propel millions — hope that democracy will replace tyranny and terror. But in the short haul, violence and vile rhetoric, like sex and celebrity, guarantee an immediate audience.
So the “big stories” get lost in the momentum of the “now.”
. . .
Indeed, do tell the New York Times.
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