John D. MacDonald, A Tan and Sandy Silence

jdm

The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. 
News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat 
grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain 
are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So 
devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can 
possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in 
constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it 
even more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly we all become even more convinced that everything 
has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper 
fidelis, which means in translation, “Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he’s 
out of town.”