deja vu
I've always been a huge believer in the occurrence of deja vu; I also believe that I, personally, experience it quite often. I'm really not sure how to explain the occurrences, and it seems that, for the most part, they're related to nothing more than a vague feeling that I've seen something before, heard something before, or been in a situation before. Also, for the most part, I never seem to experience the feeling with regards to huge events. Mostly, I'm vaguely aware of what's occurring, and it lasts for little more than a few seconds. Sometimes, however, the feeling lasts for quite awhile, and it becomes a source of frustration due to the fact that I'm not sure that I'm remembering exactly what I already experienced, or if I'm even experiencing anything at all. It's such an odd phenomenon, and I'm sure most people experience it in some form or another quite often, but, for whatever reason, they aren't sure that it's occurring, how often, or even what the odd feeling might be that they're experiencing.

So, it comes as no surprise that this pervasive feeling of deja vu should get engulfed in other aspects of my life, including my reading habits. This past Sunday, I experienced my latest occurrence of this feeling. What happened, and I realize that labeling this deja vu might be a stretch, but I'm at a loss as to how else to label it, is that I was reading The New York Times. I came to an article in the Arts section entitled "The Scream, East of Krakatoa" by Richard Panek. Simply put, this article discusses the connections, or possible connections depending on who you believe, between the Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" to the eruption of Krakatoa, or, in other words, it discusses how the one event influenced the other. Nothing all that earthshattering, I presumed. What happened when I saw this, though, is that I immediately felt that I'd seen this article before in another form. The problem was that I couldn't quite place where I'd seen it. Was it in a newspaper, a magazine, or a book? I couldn't remember, but I knew I'd seen this article before.

Now, this leads me to the most unfortunate aspect of the story. I wracked my brain for the answer, and I came to the conclusion that, yes, I'd seen this article before, and I was convinced, in ways I hate to admit, that I'd seen it before in a newspaper, but that newspaper was The New York Times, the very same publication that printed this very article. So, how could I prove that? Well it was a simple task; I just looked it up in the National Newspapers Database by Proquest. Concurrently, to both my dismay and ultimate relief, I found the following: (1) a link to the above mentioned article (2) a link to an article entitled "More than a 'Scream': A Blast Felt Round the World" by Leon Jaroff . Without reading the articles, you can see, they both discuss the very same topic. So what?

Well, I think this is a big deal for several reasons, the first of which deals with the notion of repetition in journalism. Surely, one can comb the various popular magazines or newspapers and find similar content between them on numerous occasions. In fact, I do this quite often with all the magazines I subscribe to. For the most part, you can tell which movie star, musician, or author is promoting what when a plethora of articles about said person start appearing in a wide spectrum of titles. It's especially easy to see repetition of either photos, stories, and the like in publications that originate under the same banner but in different forms, see Maxim and Stuff. This type of repetition smacks of laziness or, in some cases, a simple lack of diverse information available to print. However, what's more troubling is that it seems as if the nation's leading newspaper, the aforementioned The New York Times, has been engaging in, what I'd call, "filling a newspaper" with, what is essentially, reprinted materials on a regular basis. I've repeatedly seen articles that sound so similar to previously published articles, sometimes within days of each other, that I sometimes wonder whether I'm reading an old paper. Editorials, news articles, reviews, you name it, but it seems that they've adopted a system where they fill there pages with a lot of stuff that's recycled. All they do is change a byline here, shuffle a few words around, and, presto, you've got a new article that is just different enough to pass off as being a totally different piece of writing. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

Why I don't think I'm wrong points back to a debate I've been having with myself as of late. I've been consuming a vast array of books that are (1) critical of our current administration (2) critical of the conservative movement in politics and the media (3) both. What I've noticed happening, though, is that they, meaning the authors of these books, and I, the reader, have reached a saturation point with regards to these subjects. The repetitive feel to all these books puts one in mind of reading the same novel over and over again, a novel in which you know what's going to happen where and how all the issues are resolved before the books finished. To me, and I assume many others, this is a pointless exercise, unless, of course, you're rereading something that (1) you really enjoy (2) demands rereading due to either difficult prose or narrative deconstruction. Regardless, the point being that most people don't reread the same thing over and over without a good reason.

Back to the current administration. What I feel is currently happening to critics of it is that they are unwilling to accept anything that comes out of the mouths of our leaders without the need to criticize. Nothing, and I mean literally nothing, they do can be construed as being the "right" thing to do with our country. What this leads to is a constant set of attacks that are critical of every decision, speech, etc. that accompanies our current leadership. Reading the editorial pages of The New York Times becomes (1) either a test of wills regarding how much negativity you can stand on a daily basis (2) the greatest forum for criticism against the conservatives, Republicans, or anyone on the "right." This type of repetition could drive someone to switch party allegiances very easily, but that's a theory best left for another post.

The final reason I'm disturbed by this utter lack of creativity from the "paper of record" is that I, along with many others, feel that this is the best source for news available. It's the best newspaper printed, and thus shouldn't need to resort to tactics that would be expected of lesser publications. They need not worry about filling up the pages with articles that serve as nothing more than "filler" for that day's edition. I'd say that this is the equivalent to learning that your greatest hero is in fact a terrible person in many ways, but that's a tad dramatic. I will say that it's a disappointment that I wish never occurred, but I know now that it does, and probably more frequently than my sense of deja vu is able to alert me to.