TOP ONLINE ARTICLES

March 7 - April 3 1.

Earlier this month, 17-year-old Cole Carper traveled over 1,000 miles across the country from his home in Arkansas to the wintry mountain town of Breckenridge, Colorado, to take part in the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes’ (USABA) Winter Ski Festival.

Correction

John Rogers, the chief financial officer for Stone Ward in Little Rock, was left off AMP’s C-Suite list in the March print edition. His listing can be viewed at ARMoneyandPolitics.com/look-inside-csuite-2023/.

By Mark Carter

Eyes will be drawn to headlines reporting of disaster before they will those proclaiming steady-asshe-goes. After all, no news generally translates to good news, right? Which, human nature being what it is, translates a step further to boring.

We just can’t help ourselves, in the aftermath of a destructive storm, to gawk at the spectacle. To get out and drive by the symbolic train wreck to see it up close and in person, first responders and folks just trying to get home be damned.

In Little Rock and elsewhere last month, there was plenty of spectacle to see.

The same applies to our collective media consumption. Content related to crime, disaster or heightened personal conflict — spectacle — makes up most of

PUBLISHER’S LETTER

the subject matter we absorb, virtually all of it cheap and tawdry. We may aspire for the Nice List, but Naughty is vastly more entertaining. It requires little to no effort, after all.

Are we instinctively drawn to it? Do we climb up from and out of the gutter to stamp our name on the Nice List, or do we fall from grace onto its counterpart? From whence do we begin the journey?

The Irishman Oscar Wilde may have hinted at an answer with a line from his 1892 play, “Lady Windemere’s Fan,” kindly recorded for grid-enabled posterity by Google:

“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

So, which is it, Hobbes or Rousseau? Is mankind animalistic in nature and