Donut Truths


With the recent revelations of media manipulation, staging and out-right fraud in the Qana Affair (soon to be a major motion picture starring Omar Sharif as "Green Helmet Guy", Suri Holmes-Cruise as dead baby with blue pacifier, and produced by Barbara Brocolli (look it up...)), trust in the major media has dropped plus bas q'un serpent qui chie as an old colleague of mine used to say of morale at our common workplace and which I render in the original froggish so as not to offend the sensibilities of my more delicate readers and their firewall settings.

There is a reason that Hezbollah chose to show pictures of dead children rather than dead journalists which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Do you know the difference between a journalist and a dead skunk in the middle of the road? Neither to do I.

[Somewhat abrupt segue here as the scene shifts to Cannes, France. Perhaps a soft dissolve, or maybe one of those 1930's maps with a cardboard plane traveling from Beirut to Nice Airport - quick cut to an interior shot of little cardboard passengers with their non-gel-containing, transparent plastic carry-on bags. Music shifts from heavy, slow violins to recognizably froggish tho not identifiable accordion...]

Cannes, France, where Dan and Nicole Diver played out their pathetic little lives, where, legend has it, Ernest rebuffed the late-night, private boys' boarding school type drunken advances of F. Scott, and whence entire generations of American college students were infected by post-WW I European ennui via some sort of sympathetic hypochondria.

For the record, Cannes is pronounced can as in "can-do" (or, this being frogland, "can't-do") and not kahn is in "the wrath of". In fact nothing gives me an inner smile faster than hearing some poseur artiste pronounce it kahn. Ask any frog for directions to kahn and you will probably get a look of dis-belief and a rush of incomprehensible froggish, tho you might get lucky and find one that actually, after 6 years of obligatory English lessons in school, understands your simple request. At which point you will be directed to a horribly ugly town of concrete public housing apartments near the Normandy coast by the name of Caen.

The reason that Caen is full of concrete public housing apartments is that the original city was reduced to its elementary building materials by concentrated Allied bombing just prior to D-Day. Had our valiant bomber pilots known about the frogs then what we know about them today, they would have gladly done to Paris what they did to Caen, or at least would have done what they did to Caen with gladness in their hearts.

Cannes, as every poseur artiste knows, is today the home of the Cannes Film Festival where self-inflicted ennui sufferers from around the world (or at least those non-Talibanic parts of the world where one is allowed to make films) get together for some mutually self-congratulatory, mutual self-abuse.

You have seen the red carpet and the movie stars climbing the stairs to a showing of some obscure Bulgarian oeuvre deemed "poignant" or "touching" by this or that self-proclaimed arbiter of filmic taste. You have seen the crowds of adoring fans packed in tight around the red carpet with their Instamatics at the ready to try to get a candid shot of Tom, or Sylvester, or Sean, or Brigitte or Nicole to show Aunt Edna back home.

But what you haven't seen, unless, like Yer Humble Narrator, you have at least briefly possessed that golden "get into jail free" card known as a press pass, is the cavernous basement of the Palais des Festivals which, during the festival, becomes a week-long international film market where people from third-world countries known only to their neighbors and the UN set up in small booths with large banners containing vaguely annoying diacritical marks over a really annoying string of consecutive consonants and attempt to attract the attention of film buyers from other indistinguishable third-world countries.

The real fun is in the back of the cavern, way back, segregated by a sort of metaphorical brown-paper wrapping, in the "adult" film section. [Note from YHN - this all took place in roughly the year 4 BI (or, for my more fastidious and secular readers, 4 Before the Internet Era)] This was back in the day when one had to "buy" or "rent" one's porn rather than having complete access to it for the price of broadband access (or banned-broad access depending on your firewall settings - sorry, couldn't resist).

It was a veritable pornucopia of "adult" entertainment, running the gamut from A to, oh say, B, hustled by surgically-enhanced starlet wannabees rented for the day and lacking in any sort of diacritical faculties whatsoever. The "press conferences" for these adult film companies were even occasionally held outside on the imported sands of the Cannes beaches where the "stars" of a latest release would re-enact, live, certain scenes from their most recent oeuvre right there in the open surrounded by a horde of press photogs who seemed frankly relieved not to be cooped up in the theater deciphering Bulgarian sub-titles. These scenes often included certain manual manipulations which, at least according to YHN, were much more deserving of the coveted Palme d'Or than anything showing upstairs (sorry, couldn't resist that one either).

"So, what's your point?", you're saying to yourself about now. Well to make a long story somewhat longerish, the point is that the readers of the magazine for which YHN then worked never learned about the sordid subterranean depths of the Cannes Film Festival from his keyboard. Returning to his tiny office, YHN dutifully wrote a story keeping both target audience and demographic in mind, a demographic of blue-haired Brit and American ex-pats who somehow managed to miss the opportunity of standing in the 95 degree heat outside the Palais with their Instamatics at the ready. YHN dutifully wrote about how splendid Tom and Sylvester and Sean, and Brigitte and Nicole looked as they walked up the red carpet, how "poignant" and "touching" were the tractor scenes in that Bulgarian film, how the champagne flowed at the after-hours parties on this or that producer's yacht.

Why? Why? Why would someone who has been politically incorrect for most of his adult life stoop to such a thing? I'll give you the answer: power. We're talking cut-to-the-front-of-the-line, touch the Stars and make them squirm, drink free champagne and eat caviar with billionaires power. We're talking about power that even American presidents and CEOs don't have what with their checks-and-balances and Sarbanes-Oxley and consumer demand to constrain them. We're talking about the power to smirk, from the air-conditioned press room, at the hordes of outsiders, outside, sweltering in the heat. To make the Toms and Nicoles and Seans dance to the tune of your questions. To have multi-millionaire producers grovel at your feet for a few column inches.

But perhaps an even greater feeling of power comes from the journalist's right, nay professional obligation, to be objective.

Do you understand what that means? Do you?

It means that journalists can, with a completely clear conscience, allow little Hadji to starve to death. [5 PI points to the first commenter to correctly identify that allusion]

It means that a journalist can, with a completely clear conscience, stand outside the Superdome and report what he sees, with no obligation to speculate on what he can't.

It means that journalists can, nay are obliged to, by the principle of objectivity, ignore the whole philosophically charged question of context. Of meaning. Not their job.

Example: The powers-that-be in the newsroom have determined that Senator Blowhard is inherently newsworthy. By the commutative principle of newsworthiness, the utterances of Senator Blowhard are also newsworthy. Leading to such journalistic gems as "Senator Blowhard today said that x." Job done. Microphone packed. Back to the watering hole to discuss Senator Blowhard's sexual peccadilloes with other journalists. It is not the journalist's job, or even the news editor's job to determine or opine whether or not x is true. To determine whether or not x contradicts Senator Blowhard's statements of yesterday. That job, if it gets done at all, is relegated to the punditocracy on the second-to-last two pages of section A.

The principle of objectivity allows journalists to see and experience and live the entire spectacle of human drama as beneath them. Just more grist for the mill. Emotions too, since emotion requires a point of view, is subjective rather than objective. Which is why journalists can, with a completely clear conscience, ask of Mrs. Jane Doe who just lost her husband and five children: "How does it feel?" The principle of objectivity allows journalists to concentrate on getting the money shot (to tie two somewhat distant themes together in today's blog).

And once you have seen the sausage being made, once you have seen the man behind the curtain pulling the levers and have even pulled the levers yourself once or twice, you can't but help feeling contempt for those outside who see only the great and powerful Oz.

This power, the power to be on the inside and the power to be objective, are extremely potent and intoxicating drugs. And once they've had a taste of this power, the only thing that journalists fear is that it be taken away. In the case of the Cannes Film Festival and its hyper-sensitive press accreditation girls, your press pass would get yanked faster than a Torah in Tikrit if you even hinted that all was not golden in Festival Palace. And so you write what you have to to keep the power, all the while exchanging knowing looks with other journalists about what is really happening. The same, I imagine, in Qana.

Which is why, more than anything else, today's mainstream news is filled with what Vladimir Nabokov once called "donut truths": The truth, the whole truth, with a hole in the truth.

Stoopid People

Those who know me, and their aren't many, know that I have a real problem with stoopid people. And you know who they are. They're the one's who wear their baseball caps on sideways and their pants down around their thighs.

Check in a mirror.

If you are wearing a baseball cap and it is on sideways, this blog is not for you.

Now this here is a true story...

A coupla weeks ago, I was in my once favorite (though no longer) watering hole late one week-end and a young man walks in to the watering hole with his best girl by his side.

The young man was wearing an authentic San Francisco Giants (this blog takes place in the Bay Area for reasons which will become apparent to you later tho incomprehensible to me now)...

Where were we? Oh yeah.

The young man was wearing an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap on sideways.

He had on a camouflage-colored shirt on underneath his authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball jacket.

He had a pair of camouflage pants down around his thighs showing off a pair of camouflage-colored boxers.

I couldn't tell whether he was wearing camouflage-colored socks because of his pants being so low, but I could tell that he had on a pair of camouflage colored shoes.

So he comes in and sits down.

His girlfriend sits down next to him.

And he starts looking around the bar, basking in the glow of all the envious looks he is getting from the other bar patrons.

Now something you gotta understand about stoopid people: you know that look you get on your face when you are just about to burst out laughing but you stop yourself because you know that to laugh out loud would be to commit a social faux pas? Well stoopid people think that look is the look of envy, of jealousy.

So the young man is basking in the glory of all the envious looks he is getting. His girlfriend is basking in the reflected glow of all the envious looks her boyfriend is getting.

Now just about this time, another young man and his girlfriend walk in to the bar.

The second young man is wearing an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap on sideways.

He has on a camouflage-colored shirt on underneath his authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball jacket.

He has a pair of camouflage pants down around his thighs showing off a pair of camouflage-colored boxers.

I can't tell whether he is wearing camouflage-colored socks because of his pants being so low, but I can see that he has on a pair of camouflage colored shoes.

And he sits down at the bar.

And his girlfriend sits down next to him.

And he starts to bask in the glow of what had become some seriously envious looks from the other bar patrons.

And his girlfriend starts to bask in the reflected glow of all that envy directed at her boyfriend.

Then he sees the first young man.

Then he looks around at all the other bar patrons.

Then he looks back at the first young man.

Then he looks back at the other bar patrons who, by this time, are radiating some real rolling on the floor, clutching their sides looks of envy.

Then his girlfriend sees the first young man.

And the first girlfriend sees the second young man.

And they both start getting envious looks on their faces 'cause they both simultaneously come to the realization that all you gotta do to be the snazziest dresser in the neighborhood is to have about five-hunnert dollars and a double digit IQ...

But the story doesn't end there.

I went outside to be politically incorrect which is what you gotta do if you live in California and want to exercise yer God-given right to fill yer lungs with the smoke of burning sot-weed (look it up...) and what do I see but a young woman walking out of the mall next door with the price tag dangling off a pair of brand new shoes. Now bein' the nice guy that I am, I was gonna go over and discreetly alert the young lady to the social faux pas she was committing. But being the socially inept guy that I am, I didn't. And good thing too.

'Cause as I walk back into the watering hole, I begin to notice that all sorts of people (well, OK, only one type of people, but there were lots of them) had price tags sticking out o' their brand new clothing.

And a look of envy began to come over my face as I came to the realization that these people had deliberately, and with malice aforethought, left those price tags on their clothes. 'Cause there's not much point in payin' a hunnert dollars for an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap if other people don't know just how authentically expensive it is.

And not much point in payin' two-hunnert dollars for a pair o' jeans if people don't realize you got that much money to spend.

And no point in dropping two-hunnert-and-fitty dollars on a pair of sneakers and then literally walking all over it if it ain't gonna make people jealous.

I must admit, I like this new system 'cause it allows me to calculate, at a glance, down to the penny, just how stoopid people can be.

And just for more proof in case you needed it: Stoopid People Laws.