{"id":15602,"date":"2015-11-14T09:41:05","date_gmt":"2015-11-14T14:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=15602"},"modified":"2015-11-14T09:41:05","modified_gmt":"2015-11-14T14:41:05","slug":"hard-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2015\/11\/14\/hard-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard news"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day in the news. I took the photos and stories of carnage in the heart of Paris to bed with me last night and woke to more of the same this morning. The other stories I was talking and writing about yesterday seem dim and small in the wake of so much blood and terror.<\/p>\n

Paris is very far away; I have never been there. No one I know\u2014so far as I know\u2014was a victim or a witness to the attacks and their aftermath. But for Parisians and France, this is a day that will have its own name, like “9-11.” Had this happened in Baghdad or Aleppo, it would have just been “Friday.” So what is different about Paris?<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Paris of my imagination. “Cafe Terrace at Night,” Vincent van Gogh<\/p><\/div>\n

As a college-educated American of European extraction, there is a kind of pilgrimage trail in my imagination. Stops along the way include places like London and Barcelona and Florence and Venice. But right there at the top of the list is Paris, for all the usual corny reasons\u2014the art I studied, the movies I watched, the writers I cherished, the culture of conversation and good food. Paris is not just the capital of the French republic; it’s the capital of the good life, a place where western civilization is done well.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more importantly, it’s a place where the arts of peace had seemingly overcome, for a while at least, a past as bloody and violent as anywhere on earth. Not that Paris really is the shining City of Light of my imagining. So the news–and not just from last night–tells me. It has the problems of any place inhabited by humans.<\/p>\n

Which is what kept me up, obsessively surfing the news sites. Hate has no homeland. What happened in Paris can and does burst forth on a small-town campus or in a movie theater or a church. And that’s the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day in the news. I took the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15602"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15604,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15602\/revisions\/15604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}