Grooming

Last night I watched New York's Eyewitness news at five, and I like never watch the television news (except for the Jim Lehrer news hour, to please my high school history teacher). And it was crazy! For those of you who have read Francesca Lia Block (omg), it gave new meaning to the whole trope of Witch Baby pasting horrible pictures from the newspaper to her bedroom walls. The newscasters didn't seem fazed at all, although they made the appropriate tragic murmur sounds. A family was burned in a fire, mother huddled over kids. Some girls were forced to get into a minivan by some guys, and were raped. Best of all, a New Jersey lab technician violated a 93-year-old woman's corpse--they left that story to the end, but hinted at it before every commercial break.

This isn't supposed to be an indictment of like, sensationalistic television news media whatever, I just legitimately forgot that the whole "violent contemporary world" thing wasn't just a part of the nineties, and my childhood. I've talked about this with people before--that intensified period of parental worry about abduction and sexual abuse in the early-mid nineties. On the news last night they also had a story about an upstate New York town instating a 7:30pm curfew for trick-or-treaters. I keep thinking about Francesca Lia Block, and how a lot of her books must have been responding to how totally scary L.A. is. That's what Joan Didion is famous for talking about, too. I mean, I know we're all supposed to be scared all the time and everything's horrible, blah blah, but it seems like kind of a passe topic at this point. I think the newscasters are parodying it a little bit, even. Well.