Tributary Flooding

There is very little merit in binding in a nutshell something that is inherently small, which is why these pages turn so frequently to large subjects. Unfortunately, however, we live our lives with a veil of very small things - a beaded curtain, if you will - hanging in front of our eyes, and it is for this reason that there is occasionally a reversion to topics that are, comparatively, as the mote to the beam.

One such mote that has been troubling my eyesight of late is the habit into which the television news has fallen of cutting to some airtime-filling vox-pop segment with the declaration (as if this were in itself news) that friends and neighbours have today been paying tribute to someone who was the topic of yesterday's news.

Now the editors of News 24 (if one can term a process editing that generally involves generously padding rather than any element of excision whatsoever) would claim in their defence that today's current affairs viewer has no attention span whatsoever. If the Day One story is the invasion of Afghanistan then the Day Two story had better be the capture of Osama bin Laden or you've lost your audience. For this reason, despite the fact that on Day One the audience is expected to wait for several hours in feverish expectation that the prime minister's car will drive from an airport to some other point before its very eyes, by Day Two even a tale of tragic demise is in need of seasoning.

At this point the story becomes this business of "paying tribute", which seems to involve cutting to video of someone saying that someone run down with a bus on the preceding day always had a smile for her neighbours when hanging out the washing. Tribute indeed.

It's not that I am opposed to the idea of celebrating lives of quiet decency, but (generally speaking) tribute is surely something that should be paid to something that is at least intentional. If the good citizen in my (strictly hypothetical) example had thrown herself in front of the Number 12 in order to save a small child from itself being run over, then pay tribute to her reckless bravery. But don't pay tribute to her cheerful disposition if she was simply standing on the pavement when a bus leapt the curb.

Unless witnesses are prepared to swear that she met her unmaker with a cheerful smile, then her customary laundry serenity is irrelevant. Moreover, if she was indeed smiling in the split second before the windscreen struck, I would suspect that she did not properly understand the gravity of the situation.