Helping to build up a Los-Angeles-based publication has been a splendid, difficult, rewarding adventure. When I arrived in 2011, Zócalo was publishing primarily around events and venturing only gingerly into different forms of journalism. But I was intrigued by what I’d read and saw. Memos flew about, and meetings happened.  Eventually, I wound up as editor.

Launching new features like “Who We Were,” “Where I Go,” and “Drinks With …” taught me a lot about how innovation works (with trials and tweaks) and how website growth works (slowly). Our commitment to publishing not just professional writers but people from all walks of life brought in a lot of new voices. I took particular pleasure in working with Ken Murray on “How Doctors Die,” with Manuel Rodriguez on his vivid memories of 1930s and ’40s Los Angeles, with José Cardenas on his reflections on marriage, with Meghan Lewit on her revolting Koreatown gym, and with Javier Cabral on his idiosyncratic experiences of being an Angeleno today. That list leaves out many, many other favorites.

As Zócalo’s editor, I can take credit for some of our evolution. But only some. We kept drawing in outstanding new staffers. From the beginning, I worked closely with Andrés Martinez. We landed the matchless Sarah Rothbard. Legendary journalist Joe Mathews came on board and later launched our syndicate; thanks to him we are now carried in media outlets across the state and country. We attracted brilliant additional editors: author (now bestselling author) Kathryn Bowers, journalist and speechwriter Becca MacLaren, and energy policy expert and writer Lisa Margonelli. Thanks to our partners at Arizona State University, we got a lot more desks.

One of the best indicators of the health of a show is that it can go on without you. By that measure, Zócalo is a very healthy show. And I’m moving on. I got the itch to be writing again, to be out reporting more, and to take a little more time to slow down and think hard.

My colleagues already know how much I respect and admire their work, and Gregory already knows how grateful I am for the chance to have helped build up this place.  Yes, we’re always in a pinch, and we always need help, and that’s why Zócalo keeps hiring. So now I will go from insider to ever-supportive onlooker. And, since Zócalo is a nonprofit, I hope you will consider being supportive, too.

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Good thing I stay informed.

Confronted with such terrible stories, most of us, I suspect, have a reaction similar to the one reported by The Onion: Nation Refuses To Read Headline Beyond Words ‘4-Year-Old Girl Forced To.’ (It carried the sub-headline ‘Nope, Can’t Deal With That Today,’ Populace Says.) To be sure, not all of the news I read concerns freakish horrors. Nor are all the freakish horrors I read about unimportant. But I do feel as if I read a lot of news that manages to be 1) pointless, 2) freakish, and 3) horrible. Not that I don’t click on it anyway.

What is news for? When I scrolled over to the website of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), I learned that PEJ’s people have pondered this question at length, putting in “four years of research,” conducting “20 public forums around the country,” reading history, and conducting a “national survey of journalists.” They’ve come up with this: “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.”

I’m sure some news professionals out there keep PEJ’s high principles in mind. There are news outlets that do a pretty good job of avoiding shock for its own sake. But, in the real world, even high-minded outlets can’t resist going low when the low-going is good. In 2005, then-BBC chairman Michael Grade vowed an “agenda driven by significance, not sensation”—but when the burning limo story was fresh, the BBC placed it second on its homepage, right under a global crisis being provoked by North Korea. And I clicked on it. I’m a citizen who needs such information to function in a free society.

Why do I read this horrible stuff? I don’t know. It makes me unhappy. There seems to be a voice within that says, “What, too scared to look?” That voice also says, “If you skip this story, you might fail to learn something you really need to know.” But a defining characteristic of the properly pointless horror story is that it offers no such payoff. There is no lesson or context or enlightenment. We’ll learn that someone got pushed into the pool as a joke, but the pool was empty so he died. Or we’ll learn that someone was standing under a tree when a branch fell onto her head, rendering her paraplegic. Or we’ll learn that somebody’s diary of how horribly she was tortured will be important for the prosecution.

And that’s all we’ll learn. We won’t be told how common such incidents are or what they mean for public policy or how we should live our lives differently. So I read, and then I file it away in a drawer of horrors that I can’t seem to empty.

The tragic limousine fire is the latest addition to that useless drawer. It’s a terrible thing that randomly happened to nice people—and that’s it. There’s talk that all limos will now be required to carry fire extinguishers, so I guess news editors can justify the front-page billing on the grounds of pushing for a completely trivial piece of legislation to guard against a one-in-a-million disaster. In truth, we’re talking bread-and-butter horrible: senseless, freakish death of the sort that pretty much never happens but, when it does, really is awful. Onto the front page it goes.

Sadly, the news business was ever thus—or worse. In his introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut recalled his first assignment for a Chicago newspaper. This was just after World War II, and a newly returned veteran had been crushed in a freak elevator accident. Vonnegut was instructed by his editor to get a statement from the man’s not-yet-informed widow by impersonating a police captain and delivering the news. “She said about what you would expect her to say,” wrote Vonnegut. “There was a baby. And so on.”

Still, the online era has its own special outrages and breaches of privacy, and it has allowed us to put every tragedy on display in one convenient place. The world’s horrible things get turned into horrible stories that are stitched together into a horrible Frankenstein’s monster that is the homepage of KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles. I maintain that I click on all their horrifying crap because editors in the newsroom keep putting it up. I imagine news editors maintain they put up horrifying crap because idiots like me keep clicking on it. I guess we both have a point.

Then there are the reader comments, left by the many people who want to impose sense on senselessness, generally in horrible ways of their own. Most tend to be of the you-should-know-better-than-to-do-X vein. You should know better than to … leave your baby for five seconds … walk under a tree … drive over 35 in the rain. I suppose it calms people to pretend they’re too smart to suffer anything similar. Just now, I read that a 12-year-old has been arrested for stabbing his 8-year-old sister to death, and already comes the first reader comment: “You do not leave a 12 and 8 year old at home by themselves. NEVER! No excuses mom and dad.” Yeah, leave your kids alone and you’re just inviting—murder by stabbing.

I don’t tend to be of the you-should-know-better school. I’m more of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I school. And that is much less comforting. Actually, it’s not comforting at all. Life is full of horrors. We’ll probably experience one of those horrors firsthand. Certainly, the individual probability of dying in a limo fire or getting crushed by a tree or losing a child to a kidnapper, etc., is low, but the probability of avoiding every one of the horrors that make the papers is also low. Even things that don’t make the papers or seem very horrible can be horrible. The poet Philip Larkin killed a friendly hedgehog while cutting the lawn and got so upset that he immortalized the incident in one of his most famous poems, “The Mower.” Stuff happens. Eventually, it happens to us.

All of this is hard to cope with, and the news doesn’t help. It might help if the stories gave more context—telling us how frequently trees fall and crush people, for instance—but newsrooms aren’t going to change. Neither is the world.

Vonnegut’s approach to life’s capricious cruelty was to invent Tralfamadore, a planet where one can become “unstuck in time,” with no sequential existence, and a “dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” Larkin, more earth-bound, ended “The Mower” with a simple entreaty: “we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.”

Since I can’t get to Tralfamadore, even as mental exercise, I prefer Larkin. But I also wish I could avoid the news.

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Like most presidents, Barack Obama took office with minimal foreign-policy experience—and, notes James Mann, author of The Obamians, it showed. But a philosophy did underlie White House policy: a return to foreign policy realism in the mold of George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. To some extent, the White House has been faithful to this approach, but tumult in the Middle East has required more “idealism” than expected. James Mann gives us a concise summation of his findings in Zócalo’s 3-Minute Drill.

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“Most recently I realized it was a core tool to really power the whole idea of storytelling,” Guber said, reflecting on the human voice. “That’s how we climbed from the bottom of the food chain to the top of the food chain.” He was wearing a black private jacket over a shirt and tie, with grey flannel slacks, light-grey socks, and what appeared to be alligator tuxedo slippers with laces in place of a bow.

Guber was hosting the event to drum up support for the nonprofit Institute of Laryngology and Voice Restoration. We’d assembled in a cavernous room in one of three houses on his compound. It had framed movie banners, a built-in display case of trophies, and overstuffed velvet couches. I’d found a seat at a ten-yard-long conference table on which stood a mounted elephant tusk capped with bronze. In a hearth beneath an eight-foot mantle burned a robust fire that was offset by equally robust air-conditioning.

Guber passed the microphone to Steven Zeitels, a specialist in laryngeal surgery and voice rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Zeitels had saved the voices of many people in the room. “Now people are possibly more disabled without a voice than without a limb,” Zeitels said. But he was working on a vocal biogel that might be able to repair the human voice–even to restore it.

Steven Tyler, dressed in a black leather ensemble with a silk cheetah-print shirt, took the microphone. “It’s no secret I’ve had problems with substance abuse. I snorted half of Peru,” he said. Some years ago, Tyler found himself hoarse. “I went to Steve and he told me it was a broken blood vessel,” Tyler said. “He lasered my throat, and what a miracle.” Roger Daltry spoke about having trouble singing–until Zeitels had detected pre-cancerous dysplasia and saved Daltrey’s voice in time for a Superbowl appearance.

Julie Andrews, who has been unable to sing since 1997, when a botched throat surgery ruined her vocal cords, spoke about Zeitels’ biogel. “This is the thing that’s so fantastic, and I’m going to go on a bit,” Andrews said. “Let’s say you’ve lost half a vocal cord, and so the cords don’t meet. You’ve got one fairly decent vocal cord and the other half is completely disappeared. When they both come together, they rub and make that terrible sound that everyone has been describing. If, theoretically, you would fill out that second vocal cord with a gel that would meet the other vocal cord, you would stand a chance at having quite a decent voice.”

“So here we all are, hoping for this ‘stuff’–as he always refers to it–this vocal biogel. And it’s this close,” Andrews said. “The FDA has given its approval, but funding is necessary to make all the tests before it can be safely and properly injected into humans.”

Afterwards, Guber and Zeitels joined me for an interview in a neighboring screening room, where playing onscreen earlier had been a loop of a National Geographic Channel documentary about Steven Tyler’s vocal cords that lowered a camera on a voyage into the singer’s vibrating gullet.

I asked Guber how he’d become interested in voice restoration. He said it started when one of his employees had persuaded him to have lunch with Zeitels. Later, on a trip to Boston, Guber had stopped by Zeitel’s office to have his vocal cords checked. “I’d never thought about being hoarse,” he said. “Hoarse was hoarse, you know?”

Zeitels found no serious problem.

“So I was relieved, obviously,” Guber continued. It had made him think about the importance of voice in storytelling. “You metabolize the story very differently from when you just read it,” he said. “So I said, okay, my job is to try to tell the story forward. That’s my job. That’s my mission.”

Guber excused himself to pack for a trip to Mexico, and Zeitels told me more about the biogel. If even three hundred thousand Americans received it–a tiny fraction of the millions who have voice impairment–that would require about a million injections per year. (The biogel needs to be refreshed every few months.) So there must be room for error. “One of the important things about the biomaterial is that it doesn’t have to be perfect,” Zeitels said. “You can get in the wrong spot and you won’t hurt somebody.”

Biomedical engineer Robert Langer, of the Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has begun to work with Zeitels on the gel. Financially, the potential is immense. If each injection carries a price tag of a thousand dollars, then, once the venture becomes for-profit, a multi-billion-dollar business has been born. That would give Zeitels the means to pursue further research on treating the larynx.

One of Guber’s staffers appeared and politely shooed us out. Valets brought us our cars, and I tunneled home through the wooded slopes of Bel Air. Illuminated by my headlights in the darkness, the surroundings looked just a little like the inside of Steven Tyler’s throat.

T.A. Frank is editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of Movie-Fan.

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In Japan, in the early Kamakura period – year 1185, to be precise – a beloved general named Yoshitsune fell out of favor with his brother, Emperor Yoritomo, and became a hunted man. Fleeing for his life, Yoshitsune travelled about the country in disguise, often finding protection with admirers. The emperor set off a national manhunt for Yoshitsune, a Tora-Bora-like undertaking in a country that is three-quarters mountainous. By 1189, Yoshitsune was dead. The pursuit, in a time of few mobile phones, had taken four years.

As no one needs to be told, the United States took 10 years to track down and eliminate Osama bin Laden. We also spent a lot more money on the effort than Emperor Yoritomo did to find his brother, even adjusting for inflation. (Bags of rice bought a lot more back then.) The professionals who nabbed bin Laden may have been very competent, but they were apparently also dealing with many colleagues who were not very competent. Imagining what discussions about Osama would have been like inside the CIA, former CIA field officer Robert Baer wrote in Time, “Every time a junior analyst suggested the al-Qaeda was hiding in Pakistan proper – perhaps in a military cantonment area like the one in which he was killed – an old hand would have jumped in telling him that was too far-fetched to even discuss.”

But my point isn’t to scold my country for slowness. Screw-ups happen. Things are harder than they look. No, what bothers me is what our celebration of all this okay-ness – as if we’ve quashed a worthy foe rather than a malignant pipsqueak – says about where we are as a nation. It suggests an overwhelming fear of impotence and decline, one that causes us to overplay achievements we once would have taken for granted. “We are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” Obama said in his remarks last night. “That is the story of our history.” Well, okay, our nation of 300 million set its mind to tracking down an evil man – and we got that man. But surely greatness calls for more than that.

This self-congratulatory habit of mind has been around for a while now, at least since the Reagan era. When the United States bombed Libya in 1986, celebrations in the country were widespread, with t-shirts for sale saying things like “USA: 1, Libya: 0.” (I well remember the excitement of my classmates in elementary school.) After Gulf War I, we held victory parades. Let me be clear: I feel immense gratitude to the United States military, and I’d like to see our troops get increased pay, more manageable deployments, superior equipment, and better medical care. But not everything calls for cavalcades.

We weren’t always this way. We took to the streets to celebrate the end of the Second World War, but that was after victories in Europe and Japan. Our troops were coming home. The death of Hitler, by contrast, garnered only a muted reaction. “Reports of Adolf Hitler’s death, like the weather yesterday, left New Yorkers cold,” reported The New York Times in May 1945. “They stopped only briefly in the chill rain of the evening rush hour to glance at headlines, to shrug in disbelief, before they dived like moles into the subway.”

Now, I won’t deny that I was, despite my pains, partly moved by the crowds in the streets last night. In a balkanized era, Americans rarely come together for anything, particularly their country. I doubt any other group of people in the world felt our relief as acutely as we felt it last night. But we haven’t won a huge war. We’ve killed a vicious criminal. I’m glad we did it. And we should glance at the headlines, shrug in disbelief, and dive into the subway.

T.A. Frank is ideas editor of Zócalo Public Square.

Photo courtesy of Ricky Justus.

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But what struck me as much as the brazenness of my Chinese driver’s efforts to speed his path was the reaction of others on the road. I suppose I expected people to shake their fists or shout; maybe even throw the occasional tomato from their bikes.

Instead, all we got was resignation.

Of course, driving in China is customarily frightening, so some passivity was to be expected. But this driver was particularly brash. It struck me then that China is a place of low outrage. Well, no, let me be more precise: China is a place where the outrage-triggering bar is set quite high. Misbehavior and injustice permeate nearly every facet of life, so people cannot afford to get worked up about every quotidian wrong. They’d go mad if they did. Not to mention that they might get killed.

Such passivity isn’t unique to China, of course. Russia, India, Argentina, Italy–most of the world lives tolerantly with daily injustice. For decades, Sicilians accepted the unfair rules made by the Mafia, and Mexicans today have become used to the news that yet another journalist is assassinated by drug cartels for reporting on local crime. Pervasive corruption breeds despair and resignation, which in turn breeds more corruption.

But outrage has long been a staple of American life. (For the researcher who unlocks the formula that inversely correlates socio-economic development with the height of the outrage-triggering bar I have two words: Nobel Prize.) This is a country in which obsessives go to small claims court over melted ice cream because of that defective cooler they were sold on Craigslist. It’s often silly–but not in a terrible way. Outrage is a luxury born of high expectations of fairness.

And what happens when those expectations change? It’s a timely question, I fear, because over the last decade Americans have developed outrage fatigue. There has been too much to get worked up about: crazy terrorists, a dumb war, fiscal insolvency, Leno over Conan. And if we had any capacity for indignation left, the Great Bailout of 2008 finished it off. That’s when you and I to had to fork over our hard-earned money to rescue the casino-loving financial titans who’d wrecked the economy so that they might go on living in the style to which they were accustomed. It wasn’t just that it was a great injustice; it was such an obviously great injustice.

The fix, we saw, was in.

This just in: Last week, newspapers reported on the salaries of the top six executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two insolvent entities that have been propped up by taxpayer money. (To be specific, they’ve received over $150 billion in federal taxpayer funds so far, which could have covered all the state budget shortfalls in the United States for 2012, with plenty left over.) Over the past two years, these executives managed collectively to get over $35 million in pay. Fannie Mae’s current chief, Michael J. Williams, so helpful in steering the company into the ditch during the housing bubble, earned over $9.3 million. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), overseer of Fannie and Freddie, offered an explanation for this generosity: “We believe that employing the level of talent available at private-sector pay scale is the most efficient way to provide the mortgage market services that are required.”

Reading about this tricky and nuanced problem, the policy wonk in me has been moved to pray that we raze Freddie and Fannie to the ground, see them driven before us, and hear the lamentation of their women. But no one seems to be with me. Were Americans as outraged as I was by news that wards of the state should consider themselves talented to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars? Not really. We shrugged. We’re used to this now.

This is the trouble, you see–this outrage thing. Those of us who still occasionally feel it miss it in others. When Jon Stewart held a “Rally to Restore Sanity,” attendees carried signs like “Jesus Says Relax” and “I Already Regret Choosing to Carry a Sign Around All Day.” The joke was supposedly on all the overheated partisans of America. Well, I’ve spoken to many partisans, especially those in the Tea Party, and, yes, I do find many of them to be poorly informed. Some are even batty. But I find their anger understandable and, well, American. It’s needed. When outrage dies, cynicism sets in, and so does decay.

Of course, I try to curb my soapboxing. One must get by, just like the drivers and bicyclists who were unfortunate enough to share a roadway with my driver in China. No use getting oneself worked up into an early grave. Take it easy and keep down your blood pressure. You’ll get more dinner invitations, too. Sure, I can worry about injustice worming its way into a society, about the outrageous becoming the new normal. I can. But I won’t. I’ll do my laundry. I’ll enjoy my dinner. And Fannie and Freddie can enjoy my money. Jesus says relax.

T.A. Frank is editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of joshjanssen.

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