If you’re a Washington news junkie in search of a genuinely restorative holiday, may I recommend that you skip the spa, forego the tropical surf, and instead follow a few simple steps? First, pile your children into the car and drive to northern Maine. Somewhere along the way, manage to lose your cellphone charger, and then take up temporary residence in a small rented condo with no Internet connection and a faulty landline near the last of the skiable winter snow.
Don’t ski? Don’t drive? No problem. The important thing — the really relaxing part, as I learned inadvertently last week — is to find oneself spending several days without recourse to any sort of entertainment that requires electricity, or any method of communication apart from speaking with people who are in the same room as you.
The effect is amazing. At first you find yourself twitching, wanting to check e-mail, wanting to call someone, or IM them, or Skype them. But you can’t. And as the hours pass, a beautiful and resigned sense oftranquility begins to take the place of your city-bred anxieties and habitual connectedness.
You remember, in a blurry, lotus-eatery way, that somewhere beyond the rim of snowy mountains the turbulent world is still carrying on. That’s nice for it. Yet what has it to do with you, or you with it? You are unplugged, your mail is unopened, you’ve somehow forgotten the theme music of “Meet the Press.” You are, in fact, just like a severely anxious patient whose tangled neural pathways have begun, under medication, to smooth out. Everything is so groovy now.
If luxury once meant being in touch no matter how remote you were (BlackBerries on the beach, phones on the airplane); now the true face of escapism is the blank screen of a dead cell phone. Being unreachable — and ceasing to care! — is surely the ultimate post-post-modern vacation.
Of course, millions of Americans are free to enjoy this kind of pleasant retreat from current events every day. And judging from the plunging fortunes of many newspapers and broadcasters such as CBS (which just announced cuts in its news staff), they do.
Weird as it undoubtedly is to those of us living in Washington’s penumbra, the vast majority of our countrymen aren’t following every twist in the race for the White House, let alone which congressional committee is looking at which parts of the Farm Bill. Across this rich and lovely land, people go whole days, weeks even, happily unaware of whether or not Moqtada al Sadr has called off his militants, whether Robert Mugabe is cheating at the ballot box, or whether Mrs. Clinton told a porky pie about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.
It isn’t a function of being deprived of normal, artificial means of receiving and transmitting information, as my recent experience was. Young Americans, for instance, are phenomenally well wired (so well-wired, they’re wireless). Yet when National Review’s Byron York met youthful Obama supporters at rally in West Virginia at the very height of the media fever over Obama’s firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright, none of the young enthusiasts seemed to know much about the reverend — or mind about him, either.
Ignorance is not a prescription for civic health, clearly. An informed populace is a necessary buttress against the forces of hucksterism and alarmism and I’m all for Americans staying connected to one another.
But a short dose of unawareness? A few days away from competing frenetic media narratives, e-mail spammers, interrupting calls, and the reproaches of an unemptied in-box? That sort of ignorance is, indeed, bliss.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
