My name is Hugh and I’m a disasterholic

I realise this sound flippantly macabre but I think everyone should know I’m aware of the problem and that I intend to seek help. Maybe I’ll watch a couple of eps of Dr Phil or something.

I wasn’t always this way—growing up, disaster coverage basically meant occasional snippets on the news, no more than a brief time-decelerating interruption between Rugrats and the Simpsons.

My first memory of an international crisis comes from 1994 when Mr Carey – my favourite teacher of all time – started one particularly memorable day by silently tracing a succession of six letters in the air with his forefinger: R…W…A…N…D…A. We watched on in abject confusion as he repeated the feat three or four times until I clicked, jammed my own know-it-all finger in the air and smugly shouted out RWANDA! It was an inappropriate time to preen, in hindsight. Not that I or any of my standard 4 colleagues really had any grasp of the scale of events at the time – Rwanda was little more than a far away place in a far away continent where I had an aunt who I’d never met.  I vaguely remember some grainy footage from a cameraman gingerly poking his lens through foliage in what I now assume was downtown Kigali, but let’s face it, I was seven and I had a lego village to think about governing.

So too for the 1995 Bosnian climax – all I remember from this crisis is that a girl called Irina joined our class, whose family had fled the Balkans all the way to our big kiwi farmtown. Not that Irina ever spoke about it anyway. She was far too busy teaching us the Macarena, keeping an exotic tan and being the object of a fantastic crush from myself. Plus, even though I had now upgraded (?) from lego-world omnipotence to magic eye posters, I was still a long way away from taking an interest in international relations.

The death of Diana Spencer in 1997 proved a watershed in terms of my addiction to televised news pornography.  Of course, Diana’s death was a bizarrely captivating case of British grief rather than an ethnic genocide, but the 2.5 billion people who tuned in to part or all of her funereal proceedings proved it was an historically important event – if only because they all agreed it was.

But what many people forget about that particular episode is Mother Teresa’s funeral was held the following week and by then, we’d generally snapped out of the hypnotic Diana media cycle (at the end of the day, she was another rich white dilettante with good looks who lived fast and died tragically young). Such that when Mother Teresa carked it, it would have seemed shallow, I felt, not to accord her funeral with the same visual devotion (Indeed, it’s worth asking whether Teresa’s funeral would been broadcast live at all, were it not for the rubber-necking prying that had consumed the world only seven days earlier). Either way, for the first time in memory, I sat and watched televised grief for no reason other than an internal sense of guilty responsibility.

On some level, I felt it would be an admission of indifference to human suffering to turn away from televised tragedy and sorrow. Thus, not only was I sating my curiosity by staying up all night and bearing witness to the world – simultaneously munching on toast in the comfort of my dressing gown – but I felt I had a goddamn obligation to do so. It was just too addictive a thought to know that you had watched a crucial moment in which part of the world changed forever, and like a perverse sports fan, that you had watched it live.

In the aftermath of September 11, I was practically freebasing live tragedy. My retinas, much like the nasal septum of a crack addict, were likely so bloody and dried with overuse that consuming any more CNN would have required injecting a television antenna directly into my optical nerves.  I would soon find myself making up pretences about special study requirements during class, just to take a hit of online coverage in the school library, hopeful that a few minutes of low-buffer stream could tide me over until I stumbled home and collapsed in a state of near-paralysis thanks to a few quick lines of the widescreen lady.

Hokusai's famous woodblock print

And like any good dealer, network television never missed an opportunity to load me to the gills. Monochrome green night-vision footage of cruise missiles pounding Kabul. Russians incompetently dealing with Chechen hostage takers in a Muscovite theatre.  The perils of Baghdad and Basra. Hercules aircraft ferrying the wounded out of Bali. Three days of terror in Beslan. Madmen in Madrid.  230,000 dead in a single tsunami.  Lacerated double-decker buses. Kashmir destroyed.  Levees torn asunder in New Orleans. A gunman loose in Virginia. Flames licking through the Victorian bush. Pakistan’s submersion. My own city’s inundation.  Christchurch eaten by the earth. An Arab spring. The return of Hokusai’s great wave and the radioactive nightmare of Fukushima.

And I uncontrollably OD’d on all of it.

In my defence, and in an unconscious effort to plaster over my clearly self-serving voyeurism with a thin veneer of ‘compassionate interest’, I’ve now read reams of reports on American military strategy, the London rapid response emergency network, gun laws in America, urban planning issues in New Orleans, the Pacific Tsunami warning system, forest management in Victoria, Pakistani aid programs, Brisbane’s meteorological history, Edward Said’s essays on Arabian politics, liquefaction of the Cantabrian upper crust, the history of TEPCO and the peculiarities of Japan’s nuclear energy history.  All of this to assuage the guilt I get from condemning journalists for shoving microphones in the faces of distraught and stricken humans, all the while endorsing their sticky-beaking craft in the only way that matters – by not changing the channel.

I vaguely recall that I used to speak to people. Now, I can sit for hours watching an eternally unfurling stream of tweets on the #disaster of the day. Indeed, I suspect I have spent a greater proportion of 2011 trawling for updates on rolling disasters than I have on my honours course and my job combined.

So I’ve decided to enter rehab from disaster coverage. I am adopting the philosophus porcinus of Pyrrho who, in the midst of a terrible storm at sea, observed that whereas the entire passenger cohort was on the verge of panic-induced seizure for fear of drowning, only one of their fellow travellers was capable of acting with calm and contented poise: a little pig, ambling peacefully about the ship’s deck, completely unfazed by that which it could not control.

So cold turkey on disaster coverage here I come.

At least, right after Gaddafi’s fallen. And maybe Yemen and Syria.  Oh and after these Japanese reactors are back to…..