I was reading a story in my old New Mexico hometown newspaper the other day. Who wouldn't read a story headlined: "Man Cursed by Spirits Indicted for Rape."
The suspect told detectives "he's followed by spirits that tell him to do bad things and it's possible that might have happened in this case." So did they or didn't they? How does he know? How does anybody know? It's a variation of the old devil-made-me-do-it defense that doesn't usually play to well in court, especially for things like raping a child. It was a dark and unsettling story with evil spirits demanding to be read.
Then I came to this sentence: "Sandoval was accused of digitally penetrating his niece Sept. 18 while he was staying in Espanola." I hesitated over the words "digitally penetrating." What exactly does this mean at a time in history when "digital" can mean so many things?
Digitally penetrating. Is it something physical or something numerical? Is it something real or something virtual? Does it involve hands or computers? Is it fingers or alogorithms? Did those evil spirits tell Sandoval to do something or simply to type something? Is it data or music or rape?
Not only has Sandoval's niece been compromised, the writer of the story has used compromised language as well. What happened between Sandoval and his niece is not clear at first glance because the word "digital" is not as efficient as it once was. Inefficient words die as they are starved of meaning. Or they evolve. Or they learn to keep more meaningful company.
We must be able to grasp the horror of what Sandoval is accused of doing to his niece quickly and completely. "Digitally penetrating" is "digitally" inefficient.
SPEAKING OF THE DIGITAL AGE:
I would like to repost something I posted on Facebook earlier today:
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the most aggressively boring book I ever read -- and I have read a lot of books. It is also aggressively well punctuated. Perhaps the two things are linked.
What was Time magazine thinking?
