Playing God

I WAS dismayed recently when I gathered a number of newspaper columns and started to read and study them in preparation for the talk I had to give to a school club of aspiring journalists. I was trying to get ideas on style and content, but I think I got something else, something dreadful.

I have been noticing this disturbing trend in the local scene, but it’s much worse in other places like the US. There many writers and columnists play God, completely lost in their own world. When I look for examples of a holier-than-thou person, they instantly come to mind.

It seems that they make their own law of what is good and evil, proper and improper, fair and unfair. Their sense of balance and perspective, to be charitable about it, resembles an abstract painting. You have to be especially motivated to discern beauty in the bizarre twists and turns and tears.

I know that I have to be open to any writing style, and I should not be surprised if there are things in others that are diametrically opposed to mine. But this is no excuse to go wild into pure malice and poor taste.

When an article is simply dripping with sarcasm, insults, exaggerated one-sided arguments, etc., all articulated in livid eloquence, I can’t help but wonder what’s inside the heart of the writer.

Writers, being creative persons, are vulnerable to get completely unhinged from the basic norms of courtesy and human goodness. When they don’t make deliberate effort to be in God’s presence while writing, they can tend to run amok with their views and ideas, pitiable slaves to their own passions.

When they are not careful, writers can miss the crucial distinction between persons and issues. They can easily fall to the addictive world of creative intemperance and verbal incontinence. They end up already with a poisoned mind and attitude, sometimes at a level that is invincibly incurable.

This ugly state of affairs is most true among political opinion-makers. I suppose the nature of politics itself lends itself easily to this kind of predicament. There, propelled by the will to dominate others, shameless dogmatizing of issues subject to opinion is often made.

One writer can claim to have all the reasons, while the others don’t have any. He can project the image of omniscience, while the others are simply dumber than dumb. Rash judgments, leaky argumentations are spewed out, and they fail to notice it.

Restraint and respect for the persons involved strangely do not make it to their vocabulary. But they can have the latest version in their armory of irony, hyperboles, and other instruments of attack and abuse, etc., and are proud to flaunt them. It’s really heart-rending to see them sink helplessly in this hole.

Writers can be highly selective and biased. There are times when they can claim privileged vision of a most mysterious phenomenon, and yet they can also choose to be indifferent to the most obvious and palpable development.

That is to say, they can weave very sophisticated, solipsistic rationalizations, but they can fail to simply put two and two together to make four in an issue so clear in everybody else’s mind.

Some of them, usually women, get so irritably bitchy in their comments that they seem to validate the saying, “Hell has no fury than a woman spurned.” Of course, the men can also create their own kind of hell. Hell can indeed be gender-specific.

When this state of affairs involves men of the cloth—and sadly there are some of them—the situation approaches apocalyptic dimensions. Only God knows what to do with them.

Compounding this lamentable status quo is a certain aspect of the current journalistic culture that fosters this kind of anomaly. The other day, I read some tips on how to be effective in writing letters to the editor.

I was horrified to learn that people were encouraged just to let their emotions loose and lead them practically wherever. It was said that this style would make them strong and effective writers. Eloquence would just incarnate itself spontaneously.

The worst part of this mess is that many of these writers seem never to feel the duty to examine themselves and make regular contrition and atonement for damages, intended or unintended, made.

What can we do about this widespread predicament?