Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote in his AOL Journal about the difficulty of being expected to produce what he calls a “variety show” — meaning lots of entries about many different and mostly lightweight subjects — while Something Big is going down in the world:
…it’s causing me some real cognitive dissonance to have an entry [about] the complete horror of what’s developing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and an entry about cats in a sink, right next to each other. I’m feeling mildly guilty about talking about cats in a sink at all.
I’m experiencing much the same kind of angst myself, actually. I’ve been looking at my last couple of published entries and thinking about the topics I’m planning to write about in upcoming ones, and suddenly I feel like I’ve got some really screwed-up priorities, like I’m a modern-day Marie Antoinette or something. Huge numbers of people are dying pathetic deaths right here in our own country and I’m writing about fake zombies and space movies, for god’s sake. It’s frivolous, isn’t it? A sign of a superficial personality? Do I have a responsibility to use my abilities and my little public forum here to acknowledge what’s happening? Am I being disrespectful to the victims of Katrina if I don’t?
