Floyd and Ft. Worth: A Tale of Two Stories

It sure was a three-day blow, replete with huffing and puffing and plenty of buffeting, lots of hot air and even some gloom and doom. There was nowhere to hide from its primal force; nothing to do but gawk, and murmur in hushed tones, and wait for it all to be over.

The hurricane, on the other hand, was kind of disappointing. Floyd tore up a few trees, ripped off a few roofs, flooded a lot of East Coast highways. It was blamed for 13 deaths, mostly of the car-plows-into-the-downed-tree variety. People had to be rescued from rooftops and trees, and from waterlogged autos. Loyal owners photogenically carried their dogs to high ground. Trains didn’t run on time. But the forces of nature were nothing compared to the gale force of the media. This was a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, and the stand-up men in their slickers and earpieces lasted far longer — and shouted louder — than Floyd ever did.

In this day of ocean-spanning satellite cameras, the viewing public is warned earlier –- and titillated more meticulously — than ever before. Like voyagers to Kong Island, we heard the slow, ominous drumbeat long before we glimpsed the beast. Eye-popping computer models, resplendent in oranges and greens, swirled on television screens; mass-market CNN and cultish Weather Channel competed for wide eyeballs with nonstop coverage. On September 11, CNN.com could already trumpet the coming of Floyd "picking up steam," though it was still in its Category 2 infancy, crawling at 10 mph, and hundreds of miles from the Florida Coast. On the 14th, it was close to Category 5, and 500 miles wide. Forecasters were crediting it with a mind of its own, and if to say that if a monster that big and that smart was heading for Florida, well, then Florida and the rest of the southeastern coast had better get itself upcountry and indoors.

Dutifully, and with the media blaring doomsday over their car radios, more than 2 million residents did, clogging the highways and creating their own disaster bulletins — the traffic kind. Cars packed with families, pets and suitcases crept west at hours per mile, and when Floyd cruised on by, folks were inclined to feel that safe had been exactly the same as sorry. "There was no need to go," Georgia convenience-store owner Subhash Patel told the USA Today after his four-and-a-half-hour, 39-mile trip cost him two days of business. "We got scared unnecessarily by the media, by all the attention." Total evacuation: over 3 million, the largest in U.S. history.

Tell that to the weather-mongering media, which of course is nothing if no one is watching. Overcautious governors may have been a little sheepish when Floyd turned out to be less than billed, but the news outlets had every reason to feel proud: Floyd was on the lips of an entire nation, and the ratings were colossal even when Floyd was not. When the hurricane passed Florida by on Tuesday, the Weather Channel logged a record 2.5 million viewing households; its web site, www.weather.com, scored a record 23 million visits. The damage peaked when Floyd hit North Carolina early Thursday morning and then took off up the coast. By the time it hit New York that afternoon, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was trying to close the stock exchange (the traders wouldn’t go) and sent the Big Apple home early. The news outlets thundered, residents gossiped excitedly, and Floyd? Mostly, Floyd just rained. In the morning, that was on every newsstand in town. It was a beautiful sunny day.

When Floyd began to let up, why didn’t the microphone men? Didn’t anyone feel silly screaming through a drizzle, hyping the "anticipation" or the "aftermath" when the event itself was all denouement? Apparently not. The flogging of Floyd appealed to primal instincts, the craving of an over-technologized populace for something uncontrollable and unpredictable. Floyd may have pulled a Michigan J. Frog, croaking when it was supposed to sing and dance, but there was always the lure of the might-still, the carnage yet to be. And until Friday, when the word "fizzled" finally appeared in headlines, it was big, nation-binding business for the national town criers. Much bigger, and much better, than the random killing of some teenagers as they prayed.

On Wednesday night at 7 p.m. (8:00 in Floyd’s time zone), a man named Larry Ashbrook strolled into Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol. He emptied three clips into the hallowed air. Three adults and four teenagers were killed, eight others wounded. After Ashbrook was done shooting young Baptists, who had gathered to hear a Christian-rock concert, he finished his cigarette and turned the gun on himself.

As a news story, it lacked for little. A pipe bomb had gone off; authorities needed to send a robot in to check Ashbrook’s body for booby traps. Shiny, happy, God-fearing kids mowed down when God was supposed to be caring for them. A throwback to Cassie Bernall at Columbine, and the shredded prayer circle in Paducah, Ky., last year. CNN followed step by step the rampage, flight and capture of Buford Furrow at the L.A. Jewish Community Center in August. Just one had died. Columbine? We’ve only just now stopped hearing about Columbine. Yet the shooting barely led CNN that night, and was quickly subsumed by Floyd. No helicopters. No vigils. Just rain.

Why? A New York Post columnist complained shrilly that Christians, in death, get short shrift. "To so many media figures, Christians — specifically evangelicals, orthodox Catholics and others who believe in traditional Judeo-Christian moral teaching –- are not victims, but victimizers," wrote the columnist, Rod Dreher. "If Larry Gene Ashbrook, guns blazing, had walked into a synagogue, gay bar, an abortion clinic or even a black church service, there is no doubt what the government, cultural and media elite’s reaction would be." Dreher is right about one thing: Ashbrook’s massacre is a hate crime, and might even have been stamped as such by the pundits –- if they all hadn’t been home watching the weather.

There’s an even more chilling option here –- that maybe we’ve reached the point, after a year of bullets, at which massacred teens just don’t stir our sympathies any more. Maybe the next killer will have to storm a hospital nursery to get his own theme music on the cable news nets. Sorry, Rod Dreher –- no matter how the "media elite" may wrinkle its nose at the evangelicals, at the Disney-boycotting gays-are-sinners Baptists, we’re not in the habit of ignoring them. Cassie Bernall, shot in the head in the Columbine library because she copped to God, got a truckload of ink. No, this being the entertainment business, it’s more likely a matter of timing. And the emotional difference between two tragedies –- another teen massacre, which sickens, and another devastating hurricane, which, on a deep level, is undeniably exhilarating.

Even if it was a little disappointing.

Newsfile: Guns and Violence

Photo Essay: In the Path of Floyd