Horizon
Over the electronic horizon at an invisible distance nuclear reactors melt like ice cream and release tiny black lines of radiation that wriggle in the air like worms and there is no way to stop it so television news have pulled back correspondents and crews because once a disaster has lost its event status and become an ambient condition there is nothing to say about it from a production standpoint just as there is nothing to say about the fact that in most other places and for the most part electrical infrastructures operate without incident.
Great breath, Stephen. Good force as well to the imagery here. I like.
An poignant observation and effective as one thought. *
read what you wrote in the forum about silence rgd your "political" pieces. well, i enjoy them. this one in particular. clever closing - "ambient condition"...so sharp and so sad.
On the nosey. I guess a meltdown is not "sexy," to coin a phrase. To the news folks, that is. *
thanks much for the reads and comments. i debated the comment in the comment thread in the forum about this sort of piece because i didn't want it to appear like some backhanded plea for these. i felt more like it was possible that the confrontational nature of these satirical pieces ran against something about the space.
the idea that in terms of media coverage in the states in particular there's functionally no difference between disaster and normal if disaster doesn't conform the the tv genre rules that define disaster is pretty disconcerting, yes?