By Ian O’Doherty via Independent.ie
Well,
that’s a bit of a bummer, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, so the families of the
239 people who went down on Flight MH370 will finally find some
much-needed closure. And sure, when you’re feeling all grown up and
mature about things, you are prepared to accept that the 300 pieces of
wreckage they found in the ocean yesterday provides incontrovertible
proof that the airliner crashed. But still, aren’t you just a little bit
disappointed? Isn’t the truth so banal and uninteresting?In fact, such were the similarities between this case and Lost that people are now looking at the mundane facts of the crash with as much disappointment as they felt when they watched the last ever episode of that infuriating show.
Obviously, any time a plane crashes, it’s news. The bigger the plane the bigger the story, and they don’t get much bigger than the Boeing 777 which, until now, had an enviable flying record. But what we’ve witnessed over the last two weeks quickly waved goodbye to mere ‘news’; and became a febrile asylum of claims, accusations and conspiracies, the madder the better.
But,
as fascinating as any plane crash is, and understandable though it may
have been for people to fill their gaps in information with deranged
theories, one simple fact remained – planes crash, bad things happen and
people die all the time. The simple truth is that sometimes we would do
well to remember the words of that wise sage Homer Simpson who reminds
us that life is just a bunch of stuff that happens.It became depressingly obvious just how far the once respectable trade of journalism has slipped when CNN anchor Don Lemon devoted an entire section of his show to possible ‘supernatural’ explanations, which saw him actually ask his guests: “Is it preposterous to consider a black hole as a possibility?”
Well, the simple answer to that question is… um, yes, it is extremely preposterous. And dumb. And scientifically absurd. Having dealt with the black hole theory – the guests declared they thought it an unlikely explanation – the Bermuda Triangle was then discussed as a possible culprit. Now, I’m no expert, but I would have thought the Bermuda Triangle was located somewhere around, um, Bermuda, rather than the Indian Ocean.
CNN’s
sister network, HLN, even featured a psychic, Lisa Williams, who
reckoned the plane had landed near water or trees and boasted that:
“Naturally, I don’t have hard, concrete evidence. I think any psychic
who has hard, concrete evidence can’t do their job correctly, because
they get misinformed.”You have to hand it to her, and the producers who booked her on the programme, because it takes a remarkably hard neck to take pride in eschewing evidence and thinking that hard facts can ‘misinform’ you. Just as nature hates a vacuum, it’s human nature to fill gaps in our knowledge with conjecture. But the possible explanations simply became ever more outlandish, and we saw everybody from Pakistan and Iran to North Korea and the Americans blamed for stealing it, all with the now customary scant evidence.
So now that the mystery seems to have been solved, have people finally regained their senses and started to accept that sometimes a crash is just a crash? Well, not exactly.
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