I watch them with the sound off. Talking heads, perfectly coiffured, plastered with foundation. They don't look real at all. They're from another planet, a land where the inhabitants are only ever seen from the waist up, a land where fate is an autocue, a planet of disasters and murders and scandal.
I flick the remote. There are more of them. They must build them, assemble them from made to order parts, molded and precise. Is it Botox? Mood suppressors? It must be something. Maybe they are lobotomized before being put to work?
Starving children. Oil spills. A man throws his children off a bridge to spite his wife. A dictator annihilates his opposition. Nothing. They are unmoved, unmoving. Just the lips, and eyes flickering almost imperceptibly.
Another channel. Now they sit around a table, clucking at each other like best friends. Their smiles are ersatz, as joyous as the Coca-Cola sign that presides over Kings Cross. It becomes meaningless. Does it even sell soft-drink anymore? It exists because there's nothing else to replace it; it's there because nothing else can fill the vacuum.
Do you think that they pray for rain before bedtime? There's no news in utopia. They are attached to tragedy, to utter suffering, to misery. They function because all is not right, and that's the way it must be for their survival. They are pallbearers, holding their position in a tempest. Without anchors, they will perish.
