As the tragedy in West Virgina reminded us, there really and truly is such a thing as reality

Am I the only one who darn near wept with joy at the return of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show Wednesday night after the long holiday blackout? Through the long national nightmare that has been the Bush cabal, how precious has this ray of sanity been?

Oh sure, there were Daily Show repeats. I actually watched a couple, and was a little surprised at how well they held up to repeat viewing. And then, eerily, there was a show that was almost more timely the second time around.

By cosmic coincidence, on Monday night Comedy Central slotted in one of the show's classic efforts, featuring a memorable montage of the "all-news" cable channels' "coverage" of the recent Miami airport-shooting incident. It was at once hilarious and terrifying: a jaw-dropping collage of blabbering heads engaging in what many of them acknowledged in the moment was pure speculation, piling blithering conclusion on top of hysterical (and utterly wrong) assumption until you expected to see all those heads begin exploding.

What made it so tragically timely this week, of course, was the then-still-mounting media hysteria over the West Virginia mine disaster.

Of course we all wanted to know what was happening. How could we not? Even for those of us with no direct connection to the event beyond simple human empathy, it was horrible to have hour after hour pass with really no new knowledge.

Unfortunately, when there is nothing new to know, then, well—hmm, how shall I put this?—there's nothing new to know. It's a terrible state to live in, when all one can do is await actual information. But that's part of life, one of the hard lessons we have to learn as part of the process of maturation.

Now early on Monday, when I was more or less forced to watch some of the "coverage" at the gym, it did seem to me that the representative of the mine company who answered virtually every question with an "I don't know" damn well should have known more than that. I mean, that bozo couldn't even answer questions about how his own company was responding.

Later in the day, however, I was grateful even for the bozo. Under such circumstances, "I don't know" is a better answer than wild speculation or pure invention.

Some DWT readers may recall a bit of pondering I did awhile back about the modern phenomenon of what I've come to call "reality substitute"—where people exercise a previously unknown right to shop for a reality that's better than the real thing. And the deciding factor now is personal preference.

Yes, thanks in good part to the feel-good ministrations of the Far, Far Right—dating back to the goofiest goofus of them all, Ronald Reagan—people desperate for a glint of hopefulness in their put-upon existences have been led to believe that it is perfectly okay to choose a reality based on what makes you feel best.

It's just the tiniest step from this to the gruesome spectacle of the tragically wishful passing on of the utterly bogus report of 12 survivors. I caught part of Jerry Springer's Air America Radio show Wednesday morning when, in the wake of the debacle, he hit the nail on the head: All sorts of media outlets have grown so accustomed to simply passing on stuff they've heard that they've abandoned the quaint old habit of verifying, of insisting on actual, factual sources.

(Unless of course they're tearing down reports that contradict their equally source-free chosen version of reality. You might check that out with Dan Rather and company.)

Who wouldn't have wanted to believe that 12 of the trapped miners had survived? Unfortunately, as the people who accepted and even spread the bogus report ultimately learned, the Reagan Rule—whereby wishing it makes it so—doesn't actually work where the question is not of perceptions but of hard facts.

It's not hard to see how Ronnie Reagan slipped into this confusion. One doesn't wish to be flip about a monstrous scourge like Alzheimer's, but at the time when the former president announced his publicly, it was clear to a lot of us that he had lived much of his adult life in a pre-Alzheimer's cocoon. (For those too young to remember, it's just plain fact that long before the Alzheimer's diagnosis, Reagan frequently imagined, mistakenly, that he had actually participated in events he had merely play-acted onscreen, or just plain imagined.)

Reagan was lucky enough to make an excellent living blurring reality and unreality. In addition, his circle of friends included enough people who were so wealthy and so well-disposed toward him that his sheltered world seems never to have been impinged on by reality. (I hate to be petty, but awful as I'm sure it was for Nancy Reagan to watch the man she loved slip away from her, it was nothing like the life-devastating experience of economically uncushioned Alzheimer's caregivers like, for example, my mother.)

It's hard to imagine a less likely source of information about reality. But then you listen to the stuff that nowadays comes out of the mouths of the president and vice president of the United States, and you throw up your hands.