Climate-change Helene floods threaten Big Tech stocks!

Ah! A media-worthy reason to care about the town of Spruce Pine, in Mitchell County

After days of staring at screens of horrifying and inspiring online reports about the near-apocalyptic disasters in the Southern Highlands (the Burnsville Hub Facebook group remains essential for my family), I feel the need for a byte of levity.

But trust me, I will have a serious point to make about the struggles that elite media are having with this life-and-death story.

I’ll start here. About 15 years ago, I was covering a press conference (quick here for the column) with Tom Hanks and some other Hollywood players. When the press aide running the show made a puzzling remark to me, as I stood at a microphone to ask a question, I almost — by reflex — said, “I have no response to that.”

I should have said that, because it would have made Hanks laugh. This is, you see, a catch phrase from the bizarre (in a good way) 1990 rom-com fantasy that, for the first time, paired Hanks and Meg Ryan. The title: “Joe Versus the Volcano.”

Anyone who knows my family knows that this movie is packed with one-liners and warped pieces of dialogue that we quote all the time (almost as much as “Casablanca” and “The Philadelphia Story”).

What does this have to do with the North Carolina flooding?

Here is the connection. The movie turns on a moment (at the 3:40 mark in the YouTube with this post) when Hanks’ character, who has been told he has only months to live, is hired by a billionaire to live like a king for a week or two and then jump into an island volcano. Why? The South Pacific locals need a hero to appease the god in the volcano. The billionaire needs their favor because the island is the only place in the world that has a rare mineral — “bubaru,” or “boobaroo,” is the LOL name — that he needs to make his corporation’s superconductor chips.

In other words, billions of dollars are at stake.

This brings us to Mitchell County in North Carolina.