You can't help but admire the palm trees in Los Angeles. They're tall, symbolic and quite useless for shade. But that's no deficiency. It's raining in LA tonight. And for the New Zealand journalist far from home, anticipating this year's Academy Awards ceremony, the shadow comes from Christchurch.
The Oscars are many things; they're not attached in any meaningful way to life and death. You already know how the show goes. Some highly-paid, physically-attractive specimens will traverse a glittering stage and say words that on reflection may seem platitudinous, but at the time are heartfelt. Frocks will be deemed significant. A joke may fall flat, or launch a career. The winners will go to parties. The hacks will go to laptops, phones and live shots. I include myself in the above, with pride and mixed feelings.
Meanwhile for New Zealand, the horror may have reached an apex, but our understanding of the breadth of the city's suffering has only begun. Set aside for a moment the dead and wounded, the missing. Think of the survivors. As the numbness of shock fades, reactions rear up like dragons. Physicians are warning of post-traumatic stress disorders. It's what they used to call after World War One, shellshock. So much for the lucky ones.
I recognise I'm unqualified to comment on what happened in Christchurch. I lost no-one. I'm on the other side of the world. Perhaps the greatest discomfort I experienced was a neighbour who dates a CBS producer waking me up at 5 am wanting numbers in New Zealand. Materially, my experience of Christchurch, via New York, hasn't been too dissimilar from someone living in New Plymouth; mediated by screens, and by the tireless and admirable work of my colleagues covering the tragedy. But New York isn't New Plymouth.
There's a double disqualification, distance and trivia.
Why cover the Oscars at all? Well, frivolity and glamour may not always be desirable, but they have uses. They distract us. The shiny stuff is nice to look at. Many say distraction is toxic. The writer Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death argued that the American propensity for celebrity, for what is essentially junk experience, was destroying public discourse. I'm not convinced. Times like this - the courage of the rescue workers; the feeling that so much of life is tenuous, unfair, perhaps even cruel- throw distraction into another light. Nonsense may compete with sobriety, but it doesn't prevail.
Ideally, this year's Oscars will be as fleeting as the earthquake currently seems defining, but - I know - will not define Christchurch. You may have heard the film The King's Speech is being touted as about to sweep the Academy Awards. I've got my fingers crossed for its writer David Seidler, the British-American who learned his trade working in New Zealand. I met him last week, and he spoke with great admiration for Kiwi adaptability and quiet resourcefulness.
So I hope he wins. I hope everyone looks nice. Maybe there'll even be a wardrobe malfunction. We'll forget for an instant. And in forgetting - momentarily - we'll be preparing to return to our sorrows.
