September 19, 2007--BREAKING NEWS: A Seminal Event

Until yesterday at Newark Airport, post Larry Craig, I hadn’t ventured into a public men’s room. But after a long flight from Florida, I needed too. It was an unnerving experience. I was tempted to turn around and leave, but then I saw Arlen Specter there and I . . . . Just kidding. But in spite of my trepidations, no one is being deterred from entering the infamous real thing--it seems that the Senator Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Minneapolis Airport is now almost as popular a tourist destination as the Mall of America. The NY Times reports that the owner of the shoeshine shop next door gets at least 50 questions a day about it. (Article linked below.) “It’s ridiculous,” he says; but I’ll bet it's good for business. There’s a steady stream (forgive the pun) of visitors who want to be a part of history. One said, “It’s a seminal event [without intending any etymological irony]. It’s part of the experience of living in 2007. It’s a celebration of hypocrisy.” Others are less politically hip. They just want to be a part of the story. For example, using his cell phone, Michael Hogstad zapped a picture of the actual stall (number eight in a row of nine—the sting cop used number seven) back to his wife in Norfolk: “She thinks it’s cool to have a picture of the news.” A picture of the news? I wonder how many will be racing out to Las Vegas to get a picture of the OJ news out there? If you can’t have your own five or fifteen minutes of fame, there are now at least ways to glom onto someone else’s moment in the spotlight. And one can’t get started too early. Back in Minneapolis Robert Kelen, returning home form a trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, took his 15-month-old daughter into the toilet to change her diaper. Not because it was soiled, but, as he put it, for “historic reasons. When he emerged, he said, “Eloise, now you can say you’ve been there.” I say, thank God for poor Senator Craig and old OJ, and while we’re at it toss in little Madeleine McCann. What would all-news-all-the-time do without them? Report about the surge? The new Attorney General designee? The Blackwater massacre and the privatization of the war in Iraq? Home foreclosures? The emerging political debacle in Pakistan? The collapse of the New York Mets and the Red Sox? Nah. While in Florida the OJ story broke. I know his arrest is releasing all sorts of pent-up rage and schaudenfreudian glee in a nation still obsessed with race, but did MSNBC have to devote two full hours of its prime-time schedule to endless loops of his being hauled off in handcuffs? The three hours on Fox with Geraldo Rivera and his old gang of former prosecutors and defense attorneys, half of whom are felons themselves, I can understand. Fox is now making a career out of changing the subject. And I guess, so is everyone else. Obviously, me included.