The Weather Channel has that "Weather on the Eights" feature, the local forecast that comes on at eight minutes past the hour and repeats at 10-minute intervals.

We had something similar in Beirut after 1975. It was something like "Sniper on the Eights," a regular radio report on Voice of Lebanon that gave us the latest on sniper activity in the city as if it were a weather or traffic report, which is actually what it was. We listened to the radio before going anywhere to know what streets were safe and what streets were "hot," as the usually female, usually sultry voice on the radio described it, meaning nothing sultry by "hot," obviously.

Snipers very quickly became the roving demons of the Lebanese Civil War. They were mercenaries with no conscience or convictions. They took up posts on rooftops and accepted paychecks from whichever side paid best. It was a job that promised plenty of work and no chance of unemployment. They had their favorite haunts -- bridges, major crossings, the so-called "Ring" highway that was Beirut's equivalent of a crosstown expressway, and which was the inaugural Highway of Death (by 1980 even dirt roads and back alleys were highways of death in Lebanon).

They slouched in their sandbagged nests like the lethal dregs they were, alone or in teams of twos, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes (preferably American), reading paperbacks, murdering civilians. A handful could paralyze the whole city.

Their kills were tallied in the morning paper in bullet form. It was an unintentional visual pun that sometimes took up two or three columns, because it also included the kidnappings and the throat-slashings of the day before. So Beirut's equivalent of a crime blotter was made up of the finds of young mothers or elderly men with bullets in the head, of children who'd bled to death where they'd been playing moments before, of the occasional victory bullet listing the kill of a sniper.

I read these accounts with more fascination than fear. I was 10. The smell of newsprint and the coolness of the sentences in their linear layout immunized me from the magnitude of what I was reading about. It made the accounts seem more like edgy adventure stories than tallies of atrocities a neighborhood away. Sickening to think of it now, but I looked forward to those accounts. Blame it on the immaturity of a 10-year-old who'd yet to realize the difference between the prurient thrill of war stories and the indiscriminate brutality of the real thing. I'd like to think that I know better today.

Watching the reaction to the Washington area sniper in the last couple of weeks, it's as if that immature 10-year-old was at the media's controls, playing up the story's prurience as if it were a multipart series with the promise of daily installments. The major newsmagazines are mythologizing the sniper ("I Am God," in red letters on U.S. News & World Report's cover) and playing into his Tarot-trap of death cards (Newsweek dubs him "The Tarot Card Killer"). The news networks have serialized him in the language of promos and logos. CNN's is "A trail of terror." CBS has a hurricane-like track-the-killer map. User-friendly, too.

To be fair, that's how most news reporting is done these days. Whether it's the assault on Tora Bora or the flooding of subdivisions in Louisiana, the stuff is packaged as a reality show no more or less momentous than the prime-time lineup that follows it. It's an interactive entertainment. Only this time, in a remarkable leap over the conventional image-makers, the scripts have been inspired less by Hollywood than the Web's many and furtive sniper sites.

Like other fringe elements the Internet has congealed into charter-certified hobbies -- weekend survivalists, Confederate hold-outs, warriors without a cause -- the sniper sites form a thriving subculture of arrested adolescence camouflaged as something "noble," "heroic," "an art and science" practiced by "heroes of unrecognized proportions, doing a hard, miserable job in the name of the people they have sworn to protect," to quote from a couple of home pages. From there newscasters have cribbed phrases like "one shot one kill," "precision ammo," "stalk and kill" and other catch phrases to dress up their teleprompters in knowingness. It's as if the news were wearing a pair of designer shades. The result is as divorced from reality as a dandy in a slum.

Maybe we should be thankful for the imbecility of the coverage. It is blameless in that there is no frame of reference for that kind of terrorism on American soil other than the Web. The language to explain it must come from somewhere while shock matures into understanding. The designer shades are a protective mechanism. That, anyway, is the optimistic view.

The less optimistic view is that the reaction to the sniper's murder spree points to an obstinate belief in inalienable safety. Mayhem as we know it can always be narrowed down to a target and excised like a tumor, a one-size-fits-all sort of "regime change" from tyrants to snipers. That kind of fantasy should have expired with Sept. 11. It seems instead to have hardened into a hazardous illusion of invulnerability. Look only for the distance between those adolescent Web sites and the White House's paint-ball mentality. There is none. That imbecility, which will outlast the sniper's terror, we can't afford.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. E-mail him at ptristam@att.net.

© 2002 News-Journal Corporation

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