One of the prompts for an English 100 essay was violence in the news. Several people have asked what "gave [me] the idea for this." I love Don Henley's song and I was thinking about the prompt and during a free write it hit me: the 5 o'clock news only shows disaster because the audience buys it. So the question became, "If we hate it so much, why do we love watching it?" Here is my take on it. Note: Paragraph 1 on Page 3 should read "California may be a coastal STATE ..." The error calls California a "coastal CITY."

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Louis Wischnewsky
Quirk
English 100
30 March 2011
The Cult of Disaster: A Morbid Human Instinct
The most common stories in any news media involve, to one level or another, death,
destruction and general chaos. It is because of this precept the following story, involving natural
disaster and calamity, itself was nothing unusual. It came across as inaccurate. The story had to
be wrong. On local news stations across California, viewers watched the story for two days. It
seemed as if the tale of five tsunami watchers was getting as much air time as the much greater
devastation the people of Japan had and continued to endure. The fascination, though, was not
the footage of near death experiences: there was no film of the haphazardly wave watchers being
consumed by the lick of Mother Nature's waves. No, what was fascinating was a combination of
the many hours advance warning and the sheer stupidity of the people that still managed to be
victims of disaster.
In a song few Americans do not know, legendary rocker Don Henley sums up the news of
any given day. The song, “Dirty Laundry” starts off, “I make my living off the Evening News.
Just give me something, something I can use. People love it when you lose: they love dirty
laundry”. The inclination is to associate Henley's “dirty laundry” with a Lindsay Lohan type of
scandal. Further in the song though, it is discovered that Henley's dirty laundry are actually
events over which even the mightiest of humans have little control. Everyone may laugh thinking
of the gleam in the eye of the “bubble-headed-bleach-blond” associated with Henley's song, but
is she the one he condemns?
This is the cult of disaster and it has an overlooked aspect. Whether the ending is happy

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or tragic, all tales must have conflict to be a story. Watching disaster unfold, even though viewers
are not in immediate danger, there is the sense of success that the viewer overcame the fiercest of
antagonists: nature. Warped as it may be, viewers find it comical to see what happens when the
warnings of danger go unheeded.
As children shift from primary education to secondary education, the student moves
beyond basic writing skills into the organization of messages. While the mechanics of literature
are a primary concern, of seemingly greater importance are what has been called the “seven basic
conflicts.” The Modern Language Arts organization may argue that contemporary theory holds
there are more than seven types of conflict readers will encounter in story-telling. What MLA
will not argue, however, is that every story has conflict. William Shakespeare, in this light, is
probably the most prolific writer to ever demonstrate that conflict can be memorable whether
tragic or comedic. Still, more modern story tellers like Wes Craven theorize that the more
gruesome the story, the more captivated will be the audience. Whether the viewer prefers tales
like Gone with the Wind or Nightmare on Elm Street, the reality is that people live their entire
lives believing that all stories must have conflict.
Consider that part of human culture with Milly Getachew's analysis of violence in the
news. In her article, “Compulsive Viewing”, she considers modern viewership a kind of
pornography ultimately surmising that what is viewed is not as important as what viewers choose
to do with what they have just viewed (Getachew). This is a reasonable argument. True, stories in
the news are telling an actual conflict, not a glamorized battle for entertainment value. Yet, what
other value can the story of a volcano in Iceland have to Americans living upwind and 2000
miles away? Glorified or not, fictional tales involving horrific or tragic devastation are meant to
follow Aesop's lead: to teach a lesson. Stories of disaster in the news actually do the same thing.
Whether it is to know of a freeway accident or the exact cause of the accident victim's death,

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viewers learn something. They learn what freeway to avoid on the way to work that morning, or
whether to support the politician that wants a new safety device to be standard on all
automobiles. This makes the realization that what is witnessed is not so much a cult of dirty
laundry, but human instinct to survive by learning from calamity. Thus, it makes sense that even
though viewers are not in immediate danger, they are glued to the tube as disaster unfolds before
their very eyes. The immediate danger does not surround the viewer.
California may be a coastal city, but the overwhelming majority of its residents are well-
enough removed from the relatively low reaches of large waves that there is no need to fret over
the same fate the tsunami watchers mentioned earlier met. Why, then the incessant hope of just a
few seconds of film showing those five embraced by the throes of nature? The answer is rather
simple: because the individual viewer can feel the hormone-induced rush of relief that survival
brings. Sure, the viewer was not there, but that only proves the viewer survived. This mindset
pervades more personal conflict, as well. Watching the ID Discovery channel, viewers may
cringe as pre-rape events unfold and foreshadowing makes the hair on their necks stand on end,
but the viewers' minds also race with the most important, eternal question: “What would I have
done if that had been me?” The existence of this question is immediate among group watchers as
someone inevitability asks, “Why didn't she see what he was up to?!”
People not even need be taught to place themselves in the shoes of the main characters of
tragic news. Automatically this happens. Perhaps this should be studied and that is more
evidence of a misunderstanding of the cult of disaster. For whatever reason, people do place
themselves in the story. In the case of the rape-murder, viewers, with hindsight the original
participants never could have had, assure themselves of a different course of action they would
have taken that the actual victim did not. As a result, the viewer's confidence in his or her own
wisdom is solidified: the viewer must be correct because the viewer is still alive. The actual

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victim did not take the same course and is dead. What more proof does one need? In any case,
the tragedy, the disaster, must be watched closely, minute by minute, second by second, to be
certain. Thus, the cult of disaster flourishes.
In 1982, Harry Waters idolized George Gerbner who assured the world that violence on
TV would result in a more violent society (Waters). Years later, David Trend solidly argues there
is no way to know if this is true or not. Are there more wars being fought around the globe in
2011 than there were in 1911? The reason this is hard to know is because the world was not as
linked together in communication in 1911 as it is in 2011(Trend). What is known is that War of
the Worlds is more than 100 years old and that novel was a violent tale even by today's standards.
So violence as a means of entertainment is certainly nothing new. However, if “more
entertaining” can be defined as how much people laugh at a story, then academic study of dirty
laundry can certainly be a comedy.
The California tsunami watchers that were swept to sea might be a side story to the
worrisome event taking place an ocean away, but even in an academic setting, the retelling of the
story elicits raucous laughter. Upon reflection some might be taken aback at the insensitivity in
which even they were a participant. To find the perceived humor sadistic, though, misses a valid,
actual part of human instinct. Think about the entirety of the story: five would-be tsunami
watchers were swept out to sea. These five individuals could not have known of an earthquake
that took place more than 4000 miles away had they not been told of the event. Yet, every tale of
the earthquake in Japan came with the warning that tsunami waves were likely, to one degree or
another – and probably to a very dangerous degree – along every coast lining the Pacific Ocean.
Since the five knew of the impending danger, viewers of the California tsunami victims' story are
left wondering: did these people think they were immune to the power of nature, or did the
victims just not grasp the power of nature? Considering that every warning of imminent tsunami

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danger was accompanied by images of a destructive force greater than the tsunami disaster of
2006, it is difficult for the average person to imagine the victims did not grasp the power of
nature. That leaves one conclusion to the students considering the event: these victims must have
thought themselves immune. The sheer ridiculousness of such a thought elicits laughter at the
five victims' tragedy. No longer are the viewers deep in thought of what they would have done
differently because avoidance of the disaster should have been so obvious the only conclusion is
that the victims were not ignorant, they were plain stupid in their boldness.
The actions predicating the five California tsunami victims' devastation, in that regard,
initially comes across as impossible. Thus, viewers are glued to the television desperate to know
whether or not their fellow man can genuinely be that dumb or if Don Henley was right and the
nightly anchors are simply wanting “... something, something [they] can use ...” because “People
love it when you lose: they love dirty laundry.” The oft forgotten aspect of the cult of disaster, or
“dirty laundry,” is the human institution of conflict. Whether Scarlett gets her man or Rhett
“[doesn't] give a damn,” people are drawn to the battle. Immediacy of danger does not matter to
the human mind; what matters is that each individual “survives” the most horrific of tragedies.
Shakespeare saw hundreds of years ago that, sadly, sometimes there are tragic comedies where it
is the sheer stupidity of man that causes his own demise, not the might of the force he is against.
Under this consideration, the bubble-headed-bleach-blond is not the purveyor of dirty laundry, it
is the morbid human instinct of survival that has institutionalized the cult of disaster.