At 9:55pm local Dallas time, NBC news broke in with AN URGENT UPDATE!!! Yasser Arafat died. Not exactly an Aristotelian tragedy, but I'm certain that some sectors of the world probably took this news a little harder than the Bosch household.
Anyway, pretty much everyone in the world had it figured out that he was in media res of shuffling off this mortal coil (everyone except that PLO guy who insisted even until this morning that Arafat was in a "deep sleep"); so what bothers me is my own reaction to this news: not worry, concern, sympathy, regret, loss, or anything else a remotely savvy world citizen might feel at the loss of a leader of humans. Rather, I questioned why NBC News broke in on the last few minutes of a tv show to tell us.
I'm not crazy. The media are describing him as statesman, patriot, Nobel Prize winner and terrorist in the same breath. I wonder how many of my other fellow Americans went, "Hmph. Arafat's dead. I wonder if the next Bachelorette will be a hot black chick?"
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