3.27.2001 00:05
Gossip gone rancid: Chattering away our nameless boredom
WASHINGTON

READING THROUGH the paper a few weeks back, I suddenly realized: He's gone. President Clinton, the pardons, and even the commentaries about the pardons -- all gone, vanished, like a storm that seems to take days to blow in, only to evaporate in a single hour.

Whether or not Clinton will be back, I'm sure of one thing: However dull the front page, we will soon fix upon another story or personality on which to obsess. For we have become a culture of chatterers. O.J., Jon Benet, Timothy McVeigh, the Unibomber, Bill and Monica. We have become addicted to stories that, although they may well prove minor from a wider historical perspective, generate a vortex of chat.

I choose my words deliberately, as homage of sorts to the modern German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. He first gave serious, philosophical consideration to the phenomenon of chat -- the inconsequential speech that fills up our daily existence. For what Heidegger understood to be a noxious threat to authentic existence in the early days of the 20th Century has become the very air we breathe. Now if I understand my Heidegger (never an easy read), he was wise enough to distinguish between small talk, gossip and chat.

Small talk has a valuable role to play in our lives. It's quite true that small talk is inconsequential; nothing malign occurs if small talk goes unsaid. The possibility of a snowstorm, how the Red Sox are doing, what the grandchildren are up to, where the neighbors are going this summer -- we can live without exchanging such information. I know whole neighborhoods, churches and academic departments that have successfully avoided small talk for years.

But a life devoid of small talk would also be a life where we would seldom come to know another person. Because it's only through small talk that we begin to share ourselves -- to be at home in the world we inhabit. Few of us reveal ourselves immediately. And once we've made close friends, much of our conversation continues to be small talk. Not every exchange can (or even should) be an intense exploration of eternal verities. Even lovers find in small talk a way of expressing intense passion.

Without small talk our world would quickly become anonymous and cold. The people we encounter would become, at best, problematic tokens to be manipulated the best we can.

Gossip is small talk gone rancid. Whereas with small talk we are more concerned with the act of saying than with what we say, with gossip we become fixated on the "what" of what we're saying. Gossip is to small talk what pornography is to art. And I've long suspected that one reason most of us love gossip is that we're able to hide a prurient interest in the misfortunes or misconduct of others beneath a tarp of concern. Who doesn't enjoy hearing bad news about someone else? If small talk lets us feel at home, gossip lets us feel at home by trashing someone else's house.

Small talk and gossip have been with us since the cave painters of Chauvet found the local bison a worthy subject. But chatter presents us with something as modern as nuclear fission or atonal music. For it is modernity that has let language proliferate in inverse proportion to what it has to communicate. And this is what we mean by chatter.

Say a politician is charged a felony. His actions are reported in the paper and the rest of the news media. Communal small talk, if you will. Once upon a time, we had to read a newspaper carefully or at least listen attentively. But now, when the demarcation between information and entertainment is nonexistent, we soak up news effortlessly like a sponge -- even when the news is inaccurate or, worse, irrelevant. (Do we really need to know the details of a child burned to death in some triple-decker blaze?)

Next, where once there would have been an investigation before anything approaching public censure, the news is picked up by the cable networks. And we are now knee-deep in gossip. For what is television's 24-hour-a-day analysis but a endless churning of the same story? The charge of felonious behavior has become a stage upon which media personalities strut -- yet another chance to view James Carville and Mary Matalin do their post-modern Stiller and Meara routine, or the perennial preppy, Tucker Carlson, join battle with the aging liberal, Bill Press.

Such putative analysis isn't the end of it, though. Far from it. For now the media's second-string of talking-heads -- local radio shows and others -- proceed to analyze the analyzers who, in turn, proceed to analyze their analysis of the original analysis. It is not uncommon to hear Rush Limbaugh talking about Sam Donaldson having talked about Rush Limbaugh when he had been talking about Sam Donaldson.

And, finally, if you're still with me, Carmine-from-Cranston phones in to give his opinion on Wilma-from-Woonsocket's opinion of the analysis of an analysis of an analysis. Full-blown chatter is now in session.

Lest you think that chatter is limited to the house-bound, the bored, and the lonely who support the talk-industry, consider our cultural reception of an O.J. or Clinton. There was not (and never will be) resolution. Not because these men are guilty or innocent of anything. Nor because one hired a dream-team of lawyers, and the other is a genius at spin. Guilt and innocence, lawyers and spin are beside the point. For once caught up in the accelerating swirl of chatter, their initial actions, whatever they were, have simply disappeared.

If there ever were a substantive issue, it was suffocated long ago beneath infinite levels of commentary. Not to put too fine a point on it -- there is no Nicole, there is no Monica, there is no Rich. Just as there is no Jon Benet, no 600,000 Iraqi dead from the Gulf War, no presidential winner in Florida. Whether or not we ever view McVeigh's execution, simply the chance to talk about the chance to view his death is enough. The list grows ever endless of "facts" rendered "nonfacts" by chatter.

But we misunderstand chatter if we blame its existence on the media. Cable-news and talk-radio are as much beside the point as guilt and innocence. (Paradoxically, criticizing the media has itself become another form of chattering.) For Heidegger, the media are only an enabler of chatter, not its source.

Rather, chatter arises from our attempt to fill up time to escape the boredom that has come to undergird Western civilization -- to escape the possibility that history may be over, that this flat time of ours is all there is. As a child whistles in the dark to ward off some nameless fear, we are a culture that prefers to chatter -- aimlessly, endlessly, desperately. To ward off what? Who knows? As long as we keep on chattering, we'll never have to answer -- or even face the possibility of an answer.

With chatter there can no longer be any subject under discussion. Nor can there be a real concern with clarity or, for the matter, resolution. For if there were subject, clarity and resolution, chatter could no longer generate the momentum that moves it. There would be nothing but the silence we call, significantly enough, dead air. And we would be thrown back onto ourselves, forced to make an attempt at honest-to-goodness small talk.

President Clinton is gone, and may never return. And if the last couple of months are anything to go by, President Bush shows no promise of engendering salaciousness. You can't chatter over taxes. But don't despair. In no time we will find ourselves with something to chatter about, even if it doesn't exist.

David Lewis Stokes Jr., an occasional contributor, is an associate professor of theology at Providence College, where he also teaches courses on Western civilization.