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.