Events in the real world have taken an apocalyptic turn in recent days, and yet probably the most interesting thing about all the mayhem — apocalypses large and small — from earthquake-tsunami-induced nuclear meltdowns in Japan to mass decapitations on I-95 ("The stanchion hit the upended bus 'at face level'," to quote the New York Post) — is that it's all news.

News is funny.  I guess you could call it demotic, in a way, because in today's 24-hour news cycle civil war in Libya can take a back seat to the random rantings of Charlie Sheen.  And it's not that somewhere inside we don't know that one is more important than the other, it's that, when given the choice, we aren't always all that interested in the important stuff. 

It's sort of the "eat your vegetables" theory at work here.

And you have to cut people some slack.  There's a lot of shit going on out there in the world, and you can't blame people for wanting to watch a rock star meltdown more than the Muammar el-Qaddafi Show, which is, after all, just a rock star meltdown with potentially thousands of casualties and the fate of a nation at stake.  I don't know if he's been snorting Charlie Sheen, but unfortunately Qaddafi does seem to be... winning. 

Events in Japan are truly horrifying — like sci-fi horror movie horrifying — but mega-earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis have been in the news so much lately it's leading to natural disaster fatigue.  It's like a summer movie season with nothing but back-to-back Roland Emmerich blockbusters. 

Not that the news is all about us.  About how we feel — or if we feel.  Although sometimes it really does seem to be a test of our ability to feel anymore.  As Jean Anouilh wrote in his comedy of errors Cécile: "one cannot weep for the whole world, it is beyond human strength.  One must choose."  

Most of us still think there are some things so horrendous we cannot choose but to weep, but there are also plenty of people out there ready to prove us wrong.  Whatever it is, Google it, and you'll find them soon enough.

Again, the moral side of the brain struggles to put it all in perspective, but events on the scale of what is unfolding in Japan are impossible to grasp.  Whereas watching someone with no sense of perspective whatsoever is, well, more like real life for most of us. 

We think we can process news "unfiltered" but there is a good argument for the hierarchy of professional journalists and public intellectuals who used to put it in context for us.  The Fox News parody of today has obviously made a mockery of this model.  It's easy to forget that journalism was once considered a sacred calling. 

Back in the day the news hour was a daily sacrament for a secular society.  You tuned in at a certain time expecting certain things.  The news followed a pattern as strict as high mass, and just as serious.  The best journalism exposed the truth, back when exposing the truth mattered. 

There was, until fairly recently, a sort blood/brain barrier between entertainment and news.  Even to the point where they looked totally different.  From acting style to set design you could never mistake a Hollywood drama or a television sitcom — even Hollywood dramas and television sitcoms about news — for  the news.

Not so, as everybody knows, nowadays. 

It's hard to overstate how completely the universe of not-so-subtle social cues that separated realms of reality and fiction have collapsed.  But weirdly, as the world we inhabit becomes more unreal, we are ever more insistent on "authenticity" in our virtual reality.  (Authenticity being, ironically enough, conveyed through hand-held cameras and ready quips that sound off-the-cuff.)

Virtually all experience is now mediated, or might as well be.  And we don't really seem to care how unreal reality becomes, so long as we can make our various unrealities seem more real.  But not really real.  We want the body and mind to react to violence and danger as if they were real without the inconvenience of real violence and danger. 

Because obviously we are wired for a real world of violence and danger, and our minds and bodies are rewarded when we encounter, endure, and overcome them.  Without them — or at least their simulacra in the controlled environs of virtual reality — life doesn't seem quite... real.  "War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," as war correspondent Chris Hedges put it in the book by that name.  And we've found a way to wage it in peace, from the safety and comfort of our living rooms.

We trick the body and mind into believing, and part of the pleasure is in putting one over on ourselves, amazed at the ability of unreal things to elicit real feelings.  This scenario should sound familiar to Fox News viewers. Does all this fake feeling impede our ability to feel for the real?

Human history is partly the history of caring more about things that aren't (or weren't) than what is (or was).  (The latter is, anyway, so hard to know.)  Again, it's not a stretch to say that what was once the province of religion and art, is now The News. 

And like "the circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere", the news is no longer everything that's fit to print. 

It's everything, period.