MUCH nicer than anything written about Blair
Numb Nation
When What Once Shocked Elicits Only a Shrug, Haul Out the Sledgehammer
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 1, 2004; Page C01
Maybe we should have been tipped off by the detached heads.
In Jack Kelley's amazing eyewitness account in USA Today of a suicide bombing in Israel, he described three men thrown into the air. When they hit the ground, "their heads separated from their bodies and rolled down the street."
This is a movie script detail. You can imagine it perfectly because you've seen it before, while eating popcorn. As the heads bound along, they preferentially face the viewer. In Kelley's first draft, a couple of the heads were still blinking their eyes. (Picture a movie producer reading that in the script: "Beeeyootiful," he says.)
It didn't happen, of course. No adults were decapitated in the bombing, USA Today learned when investigating Kelley's work. The paper has come to the stunning conclusion that its star reporter was a serial fabricator. The Kelley case will inevitably be viewed as an example of something seriously wrong with American journalism. But it's also a small symptom of a broader, more chronic disease in popular culture: the Sledgehammer Effect.
American society hasn't been dumbed down so much as numbed down. To make a big impact, to be heard above the chatter and static of an information-saturated society -- and to write a newspaper story that jumps off a page already full of violence, rage and tragedy -- a person has to crank the volume, intensify the rhetoric, get more heads and body parts flying.
