Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Saturday, March 16, 2002 Whose story is it, anyway? I've only had a few encounters with newspaper reporters in my life where my beliefs or opinions were solicited, but those encounters were enough to clue me into the profession. Reporters are basically disingenuous which is a fancy way of calling them liars. I don't mean that they lie about not being reporters (although they do that sometimes, too), but they do their best to create a false sense of reality. Reporters exist to do one thing really, and that is to collect good quotes from any situation. A good quote is an emotional outburst, remark, conclusion, or statement of prejudice, hatred, anger, rage, despair, or attack. A good quote is brief, provocative, sarcastic, mean, or inflammatory. A good quote simplifies an issue into black and white which the reporter can then accuse the speakers of such as being what? - why simplistic, of course. What is it about quotations that are so important? For some reason, we love what talking reveals about others and might it tell us about ourselves. Novelists have been trained for many decades now to try and base their stories entirely on dialog. Dialog conveys meaning in a way that's shorthand. We pick up cues and clues about character through dialog. The famous phrase in a writing class now is, "Don't tell, show!" That is, don't explain or narrate a great deal. Show a lot of talk and action. In a sense, Shakespeare is king because a playwrite, after all, is all show - talk and action. The great critic, Samuel Johnson, complained of the Bard's set pieces of soliloquy as the worst part of Shakespeare as the poet brought everything to a halt for the sake of his ruminations. A reporter pretends to be a regular human being just wanting to talk to you about something. He wants to come across as sympathetic yet a tad quizzical - "Explain to me how it was you thought..." And people, God love ‘em, have this God-awful compulsion when in a jam to want to explain their way out of it. Police count on the fact that wrong doers invariably want to explain much more than they want a lawyer present to protect their rights and advise them to shut up. It's like the child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He swears it wasn't his fault and if you just give him enough time he can explain Everything. Reporters prey on that impulse in people just like the police, but the police have some justification for doing so; reporters have none. Oh, they talk about the public's right to know, but no one appointed them guardian of the public and their own self-interest undermines such rationalizations. The press primarily exists to exploit others and human weakness for a "story". So, reporters are users and like agent provocateurs, will instigate controversy whenever they can. The press depends on conflict to sell newspapers. When people don't provide enough of it in the course of events, the media has to try and manufacture it. It's like all those entertainment shows that wave a bunch of money in front of people just to see how far they'll go; and the damage they'll do to others or themselves for it. The media waves a banner of attention to your cause or situation. I have a book. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody got to hear about it? It might make me rich if they did. So what am I willing to do to get that attention? Same with others. So now we compete to be the most interesting, provocative, and controversial in order to win attention. We start cynically feeding each other's worst impulses. But who's the buyer and who's the whore. Each becomes both. After awhile good or bad doesn't matter in the least because the line has been blurred by the constant proclamation of goods which aren't that good and bads which aren't so bad. All that remains most true is that there is a giant maw which never ceases to say, "Feed me!" That maw is not simply the media, but us. We are that monster which demands constant distraction or stimulation of some kind. We used to be people who could sit on the front porch, watch the grass grow, finding that pleasant and peaceful, but not anymore. I have no absolute idea of what heaven is like, but I expect we won't be bored or disappointed. Nevertheless, I'm sure our entertainments will not be as unsatisfying as we now find them, for conflict and stimulations are rather artificial and inhuman, just as reporters are most often unreal and working an angle for their own benefit and no one else's. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:56 PM | |
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