Truths blurred by a free-fall of tears

IS it me or have we been stuck in what Duke Ellington would call “a sentimental mood” over this last year? In the age of reality television, it seems that the focus on ordinary people pursuing inane challenges for mass entertainment has become a modern form of melodrama.

We can see the impulse played out, for example, in both the corny mini-biopics of “American Idol” contestants and the overwrought sob stories that define whose home gets picked for “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

This year, we have been inundated with media representations and public discussions that have often provoked strong emotion at the expense of thoughtfully engaging the complexities and contradictions that characterize our time.

It seems that the “tear-jerker” has come to influence our reactions to many things, including much of what passes for the news these days. Factor in anything having to do with either patriotism or religion and there are times when the news looks like something akin to a “three-hankie picture.”

Think back to spring, when we were confronted with another chapter in the evolving story of former NFL-player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who died in 2004 while fighting in Afghanistan.

The former Arizona Cardinal was originally said to have been killed in enemy combat and represented as the ultimate martyr -- a hero who had walked away from a million-dollar contract with the Cardinals to fight terrorism in response to the events of 9/11.

Then, of course, came revelations that Tillman’s death was actually the result of friendly fire. Here, the sentimental was exposed as simply another phase of the public relations spin cycle, one that has been in full effect throughout the Iraqi ordeal, be it the “inmates are running the asylum” argument that was used by the military courts to justify the atrocities of Abu Ghraib or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s comment to troops about going to war “with the army that you have” -- even though it was the Bush administration that manufactured the urgency of going to war in the first place.

Stripped of sentimental spin, the Tillman story becomes one of a man who walked away from the gridiron only to become a political football. When faced with the choice of telling the unpleasant truth about Tillman or spinning a sentimental martyr’s tale, the Army fumbled, and lost its honesty and compassion -- especially for Tillman’s grieving family -- in the process.

RELIGION has been a key player in some memorable invocations of sentiment this year. There was, for instance, the surreal story from Atlanta in March involving Brian Nichols and Ashley Smith. In a tale set somewhere between the racial and gender overtones of “Mandingo” and “Driving Miss Daisy,” Nichols, the rape defendant accused of killing four people during and after his courthouse escape, surrendered to police after spending time with Smith, a woman he had held hostage in her apartment.

This story featured such vivid details as Smith cooking pancakes with “real butter” for her captor and Nichols, in true Miss Daisy fashion, offering to hang her curtains. Central to the telling and retelling was a discussion about the bond that seemed to develop between Nichols and Smith around that now over-hyped Rick Warren book “A Purpose-Driven Life.” It was said that Smith’s religious convictions and the way that she read to him from the book helped calm Nichols down and led to his eventual surrender.

The overtly religious tone of this narrative came into even higher relief with the revelation that Smith had a less-than-angelic background. She was involved in what have been described as several petty crimes between age 16 and 25, her husband died in her arms from knife wounds, and she had given up custody of her daughter. Thus, she could star in the drama as a victim and former “sinner” who became the “saved” heroine, defusing the crisis and saving a soul in the process.

Interestingly enough, Smith’s book about the ordeal, “Unlikely Angel,” has already been published. And in it, she adds a detail that works to undermine all the original sentimentality of her story. During the ordeal, she writes, Nichols asked her if she had any marijuana -- to which she replied that she didn’t. But she did have some crystal meth (though she says she did not partake with Nichols that night). Note how quickly the soft-focus sentimentality disappears when the story shifts to include the drugs.

Pat Tillman and the Nichols-Smith incident were only the appetizers. Next came the monthlong media Mass that evolved around the death of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church’s selection of a successor. This all stands to reason, since John Paul II could easily be described as the first pope of the media age. But watching the coverage unfold made me wonder if all of America had secretly converted to Catholicism while the votes for “American Idol” were being tabulated.

We were treated to an extensive round-the-clock mourning period that culminated with a funeral seen on networks, cable channels and satellites all over the world. The image of John Paul II was transformed from that of a religious leader with an obvious political legacy into a pop culture icon whose Topps “World Treasures” trading card recently sold for $8,100, far more than that of embattled baseball slugger Barry Bonds, whose card has never brought in more than $1,200.

I wonder if future editions of the Topps card will point out that John Paul II headed a church mired in a major pedophilia scandal or whether it might mention his staunch opposition to birth control in the era of AIDS. Perhaps some version of the cards will give some stats on the stomping out of liberation theology in Latin America that John Paul II embraced. Don’t count on it, though. The sentimental -- beloved leader in a “Popemobile” -- has a way of crowding out facts.

This brings us to the culture of life argument, an idea championed by John Paul II and invoked in another big media story of the year, the Terri Schiavo case, which had dominated the media before Karol Wojtyla took over the ratings. Those who wished to prolong Schiavo’s breathing embraced the argument and tried to use it as the basis for asserting the government’s right to step into a most private matter.

During this ordeal, we were often shown images of a clearly debilitated Schiavo, something quite reminiscent of seeing John Paul II’s elaborately clothed body lie in state during the mourning period as though it were a museum exhibit. Both sights, for me, were quite difficult to witness. This was reality television without the edits, and it was all too painful to watch.

But it seems that the “culture of life” argument only goes so far, and certainly stops short of being applied to the death penalty, just one of many contradictions.

Though we watched endless loops of Schiavo in her vegetative state and the deceased John Paul II, until recently there was little media coverage, for example, of the stream of flag-draped coffins returning home from Iraq -- those images were blocked as an unpatriotic invasion of privacy by the Bush administration. It is fine, it seems, to represent death and dying when it works to evoke sympathy, but only in certain instances. And the suffering connected to the Iraq conflict has rarely been one of them.

I suspect that the lingering fear generated by the events of 9/11 has made for conditions in which religion, with its narratives of belief and emotion, has even more influence than usual. That’s fine. But not when the lines dividing church, media and state start to disappear. I worry that this intrusion of religion into arenas where it doesn’t belong is clouding our ability to think and reason, beyond emotion.

In an era where even the most mundane moment can prompt a shrine of flowers, balloons, teddy bears and candles, we seem to have lost our willingness to look for and make sense of ambiguity and contradiction. The melodramatic and the sentimental are both easier and safer.

It took the raw and uncut reality of Hurricane Katrina to pull us away from sentimentality as a first response. The hurricane exposed certain elements of American life -- lingering realities of race and class -- that were not intended for public consumption. It was as though the bloopers reel from the national reality show had been broadcast by mistake instead of the edited, media-friendly version. As Katrina demonstrated, America has a permanent underclass of people who cannot even get out of harm’s way, much less remove themselves from the dire economic conditions that they face daily.

Katrina can be said to have exposed the exploitation of the sentimental for what it is, and in the process it made the manufacturing of gung-ho American patriotism seem that much more obvious. The hurricane revealed that democracy has failed to reach many people right here in America. It was hard not to see the political hyperbole behind much of the recent sentimental posturing about spreading democracy around the globe. (And it wasn’t terribly surprising when the initially galvanizing emotion of reporters on the scene became yet another sentimental commodity.)

When dealing with weighty issues such as race, class, patriotism and religion, we should be able to pursue what has become now the inane challenge of finding the truth, minus the unprintable title of Harry G. Frankfurt’s bestselling book this year. But the way things look right now, that program of thought appears to have been canceled. The ratings are just too low.

Boyd is the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture in the USC School of Cinema-Television.