Call to a higher standard

There once was a preacher who delivered a sermon one Sunday and promptly lost his job.

Harry Emerson Fosdick was his name. His provocative sermon back in 1922 was reprinted, word-for-word, in the New York Times. (I don't need to tell you preachers don't get that kind of ink in that august publication anymore.)

In that long-ago message, the Rev. Fosdick made a comment that seems fresh and new. If he were alive today, the one-time Presbyterian clergyman might have used the following words as a critique of today's electronic media. (I refer to the most recent wall-to-wall media coverage of the jailing/releasing/rejailing of socialite and heiress Paris Hilton earlier this month.)

"What can you do," he wrote, "with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with tiddledywinks and peccadillos??"

Tiddledywinks is an old game where players take small bits of bone or ivory (or whatever was available) and flick them off a table (or other flat surface) into a cup or basket. It's a simple, slight game from another era. Not much skill was required; it was a way to pass the time agreeably without breaking a sweat.

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, we seem to be fascinated with media-fanned flash-in-the-pan human tiddledywinks like the aforementioned Ms. Hilton. Hold on, you say, you're not fascinated with her? Maybe not, dear reader. I'll concede the point. Why, however, does our collective media continue to feed us -- with breathless urgency -- such insipid news? They spoon it up and we swallow it down. Perhaps it is that even in our disgust, we watch and listen because we inwardly tell ourselves, "My life may not be great, but at least I'm not as messed up as she is."

Today it's Paris Hilton. A few months ago it was model/actress Anna Nicole Smith. (Does anyone reading this not know what that story was about?) I put the following message up on our church's outdoor sign during the Smith fracas:

"Anna Nicole? Remember Darfur?"

I received a telephone call at the church office from a woman who said, with undoubted sincerity, "I know about Anna Nicole, but what's this about Darfur?" Our media had so downplayed one of the colossal stories of this decade, the genocide of 200,000 people in Darfur, Sudan, that the caller knew nothing about it. President Bush, late last month, approved economic sanctions against the Sudanese government because of the mass killings and the forced displacement of 2.5 million people from their own homes. How many of us know that? I'm ashamed to say that I knew more about Ms. Hilton's taste in sunglasses than about the president's actions of May 29.

A colossal issue pushed aside by tiddledywinks. It's long past time to demand solid food from our news media, don't you think? The Rev. Fosdick's indignation 85 years ago got him fired. But there's no punishment awaiting those of social justice consciousness to tell the assorted purveyors of news, "Stop feeding us gruel. We want steak!"

Jeff Long is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau. Married with two daughters, he is of Scots and Swedish descent, loves movies and is a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.