What a Year!

From Menletter May 2009

By Tim Baehr

I was at a friend's house reading the Sunday New York Times. An article in the Times compared four sports cars: The BMW, the Mercedes SLK, the Porsche Boxter, and the Mazda Miata. Four writers weighed in, each one ranking the cars by his or her preference and giving a few details about what was good or bad about each model. It was fun to read that the Miata, with a fraction of the power and costing thousands of dollars less than the other cars, was considered a blast to drive; one writer even rated it first.

Then something caught my eye: The Miata was due for a major redesign - in 1998! I was unwittingly reading the Times from 1997. Everything in the article was old news. Very old news. I was reading a paper from the stack my friend uses to start fires in his fireplace.

I admit that I'm a bit of a news junkie, and that I engage in fits of hopefulness and dread as our economy goes this way or that, or our leaders do stupid or brilliant things, or that this or that country is about to join the nuclear community, or this or that new gadget promises to make our lives really, really cool.

The car review put into high relief just how addicted I can become to information that is destined to change.

So I Googled "Headlines of 1997" and found a site by Information Please. You can go to any past year from 1900 to last year for headlines in politics, sports, world affairs, and so on, at http://www.infoplease.com/yearbyyear.html. I won't bore you with the details from 1997, but I can assure you that most of the stuff was of mild interest at best - certainly not carrying the earth-shaking, knuckle-whitening, nail-biting, stomach-churning importance of today's headlines.

Historians love delving into the past and trying to find themes and make sense. But the daily news has a shelf life shorter than lettuce and is just about as nourishing. It's printed for us and broadcast to us mostly as titillating entertainment in media that serve as conduits for advertising. O.K., I'm a grouch. So sue me.

I'm not going to stop reading and watching the news; maybe I just like to be titillated by dire headlines and assaulted by ads. But every once in a while I'll go to that Information Please site and get some perspective.