A break from the misery

The "silly season" is thus called because of an alleged dearth of news, but very often this makes little sense. Wars, disasters and calamities proceed regardless of the season, and there are plenty of additional events – sporting, cultural etc – to compensate for the closedown of parliamentary and jurisprudential activity.

It would be more accurate to describe the silly season as a time when people disengage from public events. On holiday, we tend to opt out. For the first few days this is a conscious matter, as the news-junkie has to deliberately avoid buying newspapers or watching news programmes on television. By the end of the first week, however, no effort is required: we really couldn't care less what is happening in the world. Perhaps this is the way people felt long ago, before the advent of 24-hour television news: the world was a big place with lots of problems, some of which affected them and were therefore matters of which they should be aware, whereas most were of no immediate relevance to their lives, could not be helped anyway, and were best ignored.

Summer calls our bluff about being engaged with the world, a bluff sustained by saturation coverage of events that really we regard as a kind of entertainment. Watching the coverage of the war in Lebanon on Sky, BBC News 24 and Euronews, it strikes me that we are being told, on a minute-to-minute basis nowadays, that this war has an immediate relevance to our lives and that we should be doing something about it.

"You look at the news coming in from Lebanon," my sometime colleague Eamonn McCann recently told a magistrate in Derry in explanation for why he had – allegedly – attacked a US-owned guide-missiles factory with a crowbar, "and you have to be doing something."

I know what he meant. Each development, statement, lull, counter-statement and reaction is broadcast with a sense of profound urgency and then analysed by a team of "experts" in the studio. As the expert speaks, a tickertape carries a summary of the more recent development. The press conferences of world leaders are carried live and then parsed and analysed by the experts, as the tickertape reminds us what has just been said. Do we need to know all this, or even a fraction of it? At the most, all we require is a daily update to tell us that fighting is continuing and each side has made renewed commitments to wipe the other out. Is there any sense that the saturation coverage of this war constitutes some kind of service within democratic society, informing the public about something it needs to know about and in proportion to that need? There is now almost no distinction to be seen between the way television covers war and the way it covers sport, which turns conflict into spectacle and reduces it to a crude form of entertainment. In truth, audiences in the West have very little emotional or political investment in the war in Lebanon, other than as a proxy for deeply-held neuroses in relation to our own political cultures. What we glean from the coverage is not information about something that concerns us for itself, but ammunition for our own ideological wars against the incumbent leaderships in our own flawed-but-functional democracies. The war is not about Palestinians and Israelis, but about us and the way we divert ourselves from the banality of our own lives by despising our own leaders. On holiday, we tend to become bored with such games, focusing instead on getting a suntan or getting through some contentless book. In a week or two, we will return to the fray, but right now we just couldn't be bothered. It's terrible about those civilian casualties, but is the hard-pressed citizen not entitled to a break from the misery? Being a concerned citizen of a modern democracy is a terrible responsibility, from which everyone is entitled to an occasional break.