Theory According to Chuck Berry

Citizen Journalism

Pondering the reader-assisted PayPal junket to Denver one blogger, of hundreds expected to cover both political conventions, I am pressed to consider citizen journalism once again.

It strikes me that bloggers are yearning to break out of isolation and into the scrum, whereas any real reporter who has scored either a very influential or very unforgettable story is yearning to break away from the scrum. It is my experience that any reporter who does, and has the stones and the news judgment to do it, and who sojourns far away from the places where photo opportunities and press conferences are construed as news, is the reporter who gets the story.

Wanting to be part of the scrum, I submit, is a necessity for those whose ambitions require face time on the networks or a front page byline. My observation is that people for whom entree is important -- the newshens, for example, of the Helen Thomas, Fran Lewine, Sarah McClendon, Dorothy McCardle generation for whom mere entree to the profession was a terrible struggle -- divorcees, unwed mothers, "perennial bacholorettes" of the 1940s and 1950s whose real stories probably won't ever be told -- treasure this work, which is stenography. So too do the television network reporters, who -- just to invoke a chimera of what their values might be -- consider subbing on the Today Show a promotion from covering the White House. Anybody who has been herded into a roped-off press section by junior press aides and force-fed pap for thirty seconds will be able to decide whether or not the job is for you.

I doubt the bloggers will be given entree even to these pools. They can't take notes without their computers, and that's pretty hard to do when the AP photographer is whacking you upside the head with his telephoto lens because you blocked his shot. He does that because at any moment the President could be assassinated and he needs to have that shot. Just so's you know what the White House -- or the Teddy Kennedy beat -- is really about.

The bloggers aren't going to get anywhere near the candidate or even the scrum. Since it seems to me that that -- the entree -- is what they really want I can't see that the whole enterprise is serving any purpose. You can tap on your laptop about what's going on on television at home just as well, if not better, than you can in a bloggers' newsroom where I suspect they'll all be quarantined, and bribed with free Krispy Kremes, as far as possible away from the action the organizers of the Event can put them. Their "press credentials", I suspect, will not permit them on the convention floor to mingle with the delegates or to wangle an invitation into any backroom arm-twisting, if mayhem so vigorous is still permitted at Events, that might be going on. I think their "credentials" will serve instead to curtail, as is traditional, any access whatsoever.

Here's the thing with citizen journalism. My sense is that they all want to cover the celebrity rat fuck events -- the backstage pass rock concert mentalilty -- like the political conventions, which are eponymously the locus of everything that is not news.

It seems to me the really memorable and influential stories have always been discovered by an experienced and driven reporter working on his own, usually way off the beaten path. My Lai -- Hersh didn't even have an employer.

Watergate -- Woodward and Bernstein worked far from the White House press room, and did not, to my knowledge, possess White House credentials during Watergate (as I did).

I was just reading about the black power salute story of 1968 -- Smith and Carlos have never been forgiven by the Olympic committee -- and caught a glimpse of what a great reporter would be doing during one of those ratfucks, the Olympics, which, like the White House or the political conventions, is the cynosure of all eyes.

Walking to the medal platform were Smith, Carlos, Mrs. Smith, who for some reason had a black glove in each of her hands, and Pete Axthelm. Nobody else.

(Yalie, dead of "liver disease" at 47, one apotheosis of my theory that nothing is harder to write well about than sports.)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/23/opinion/opart_inline.jpg

There is Ron Suskind, who is the very model of a pomo reporter, and the recorder of the epoch-marking sentence from -- it had to be Rove -- "We're an empire now" -- one of those laser-eyed guys who parlayed the daily front page byline into what it was worth -- a lifetime of book contracts. The first book he did was not one of his scathing political tomes, but one following a black kid through high school in Washington, D.C.. Slavery, as everybody knows, is the true story of the democracy, and Suskind used his entree to write about that. On his own, far away from the front page of the Wall Street Journal and all their very stupid shit.

There is Tina Rosenberg, who was travelling to Medellin and hanging with the Sendero Luminoso thugs, protected only by a MacArthur Foundation grant, about which, I have to tell you, the coqueros care less than nothing. She did it when no white boy would be seen dead covering Latin America which is still, pretty much, except for those who've married Cariocas, Siberia for foreign correspondents.

Finally, there is the classic Jimmy Breslin story -- the interview with Clifton Pollard, JFK's grave digger. This is a story that will last forever, unlike the thousands of others filed that day.

No citizen journalist I know of is interested in, or has the stones, or the news judgment, to go out into the meatspace world and do what these maniacs do.

I need to remember that.

Fashion Rocks

Conde Nast keeps sending me free copies of their new venture Fashion Rocks, which doesn't, actually. I'd never buy a magazine with a picture of Justin Timberlake in a tuxedo on the cover. They have a huge spread of divas photographed by the big fash photogs, which is pointless and boring because, basically, the clothes are stupid and the divas aren't fashion models. They're not good-looking enough, and they're kinetic: They look best bopping.

And there's the problem with the clothes....tuxedo with combat boots, mmmmm, MEGO. There's an amazing column by the hippest scenester fashion writer, Lynn Yeager, buried in there, among the 15 page advertising spread of Rihanna doing lip gloss, also boring because she is not a fashion model and doesn't look good/interesting from every crevice and angle which, baby grrl, are already way over-exposed (just been reading about how Mark Spitz blew it after becoming the first human to win seven gold medals: Rihanna, sweetheart, you are no Mark Spitz). Cutlines reading "On Will.i.am, Vivienne Westwood trousers, Diesel sunglasses, Dior sneakers" approach the edgier journalism purlieus of The Times of London Court Circular. Dior sneakers, are you shitting me? Mariah Carey, in an ugly Naeem Khan swag dress, and her ilk, shot by Stephen Meisel, and his ilk? A practically endless spread of Dhani Harrison sort of looking like George and sort of not? Yawn, seriously. I was swept away by the corruption, even down to the accents and the gestures they affect, of the rock establishment watching Tommy Lee  and what'shisname, Mr. Carmen Electra, with the eyebrows, on <i>Rockstar: INXS</i>. Blech. This is not rock n roll. Showing the EZ listening establishment in boring couture clothing is not rock fashion, it's Fat Elvis.

Anyway, it's a strangely frustrating production, an effort finally to track the influence of rock and roll on fashion -- a parallel trend both to couture and street/club fashion which has gotten much too little coverage by fashion journalists.

One note. I want an Afro pompadour like Janelle Monae's. To go with my gele, my hoodie, and my kimono.

Cultural appropriation forever.

That is all.

Trolls

The NYT mag had a piece on trolls and trolling this past Sunday, and the spectacle of sociopathic young, and not-so-young men vandalizing peoples' lives and livelihoods with impunity, and pleasure, was unedifying. I think dreams of Utopian internet community were always compromised by the self-serving salesgeek aspects. But the entrenchment of troll culture is the kiss of death. They make the environment a litigible one of hostility and harassment, and reduce the quality of life for everyone who has to pass through the neighborhood. I think the only solution is Giuliani's -- get all of them off the sidewalk, zero tolerance for subway turnstile jumping, and so on, but this isn't going to be possible any time soon.

I think they fall under the rubric which Tom Friedman, I think it is, has shrewdly winkled out of the many jihadis that he, like a good reporter, has talked to. They are young men, says Friedman, who feel like dwarves.

Gotcha.

The recent arrest of an alleged "good kid" in the Suzy Creamcheese suburbs here, a teenager with an arsenal of AK 47s and other assault rifles, bought for him by his father, a retired Air Force officer who works for the Feds, plus 50 pounds of bomb making materials and a map of Camp David again makes the point that the upper middle class is incubating a generation of dwarves. Just to drive the point home, this is how Dylan Klebold got his stockpile, his videos, his website and his plan together -- in a suburban garage, in his teen boy bedroom, completely unsupervised.

I think both girls and boys of the middle classes lead completely unsupervised lives these days, although according to the sociological research I do watching Supernanny a minority of these young sociopaths are unsupervised while being totally micromanaged by ambitious and completely amoral tiger moms. They beat, with closed fists, their little sisters while tightly bound in car seats in the back of the silver Mercedes SUV, on their way to their many after-school appointments.

And the passive-aggressive mother justs nods and smiles. (One of the most electrifying revelations of All God's Children, an electrifying book about the most violent prisoner in the history of the state of New York, whose father was the first Phi Beta Kappa to be inducted in prison, and also the last, is the pleasure the boy's mother took in watching him be aggressive.) I think this is one of the secrets of the very entwining relations between mothers and sons, and if penis envy exists, which I don't think it does, it does in the agency a woman gains through the aggression of her son.

There is, of course, the billions, and the creepy messianism Fred Turner so brilliantly reports on the morphing of the Whole Earth Catalog toolie culture into Silicon Valley, a book recommended to me by the perspicaceous <lj user = "bing_crosby">, who, with the Intelligent Craftafarian, is one of the only two people I know who is studying materialism through crafts -- and toolies. The problem with a materialist, to paraphrase the famous comment on atheists, is not that they believe in nothing. It is that they'll believe anything.

The trolls are geeks, and children's time with video games and online is almost completely unsupervised. Time after time Supernanny walks into a half-a-million-dollar 5,000 square foot suburban house to find tiny children screaming obscenities and acting out killing games they learn playing adult video games. Over which the smiling mutti has, oh my goodness, no control.

When they're not playing video games, they're on the computer -- girls seeking sexual experience -- also completely unsupervised.

No social skills, no negotiation skills, no table manners (there are no family meals) or the bare rudiments of how to meet somebody's eye in the elevator, much less get a job and enjoy life in a world whose values are composed to make life human-scaled and livable by all humans in community. No lessons on how to be seen, the pleasures of the sidewalk, and how not to be invisible.

One result is this idea that STOP signs are the intrusion of the man into your libertarian Utopia rather than, for example, the illustration of the idea that God is love for your fellow drivers' right to live.

Another is the conflation of computer skills, values, and internet information with anti-authoritarianism, democracy or mastery. All three are meatspace skills, as the flowering of the geek ubermensch ethos on the nets, and nowhere else, where, indeed, the defeat of the lone wolf/ubermensch/hero by the armies of capitalism is pretty much one of the themes of modernity since the age of enlightenment, illustrates. There can be no counterculture without a culture in which one participates successfully while passing for normal. There is no revolution without mastery of the laws of society, community and so on. And unless you are -- oh, let's say, redistributing to the poor the wealth, or disarming nuclear terrorists with your hacker skills -- by posing as an outlaw you're really just another hipster. Without the style. Or a scorpion in a bottle: limbic, deadly, ignorant and like all mental illness, malicious but excruciatingly boring.

There was another interesting piece in the NYT mag which I've had occasion to think of often. And that was on Bill Gates, and the principle of unintended consequence (in this case, of his billions for global charity). He said he harnessed his hardsell talents to a self-serving kind of Utopianism -- that every starving child in the world should have a computer -- until he was in Soweto one day. He noticed there was, perhaps, one electrical socket for every 600 people, and that it didn't work every day all day.

Welcome to my world, little man.

Citizen Journalism vs. Citizen Papparazzi

The story in yesterday's NYT about the OfftheBus.net, the Huffington-supported citizen journalism site makes some, or suggests some, points about the infant medium.

• The number of OTB correspondents increased from 300 to 7500 after the Mayhill Fowler scoop in April on Obama's "bitter" small town white men comment.
• It didn't say how many of this 7200 increase are Republican dirty tricksters, or what the OTB peoples' criteria for resume and fact-checking are.
• If the bitter comment is OTB's greatest story, it suggests a number of things about what the OTB citizen journos believe citizen journalism to be: political papparazzism. Citizen papps catching the celebs with their pants down, and feeding into the pointless 24/7 CNN news cycle which obliterates substance with a shitstorm of minutiae. Call it papp style.
• It could be suggested that OTB's greatest story is 800 detailed profiles of the superdelegates. Call it wiki style.
• Obama precinct captains are covering platform meetings (of which party the piece does not suggest). OTB says this is OK because all citizen journos must reveal in writing their political affiliations and contributions. This is the very privileging of special interests -- ie., the Obama moveon geek groundswell, which I suggest is overwhelmingly white boy and white bread and privileged by their access to a $1500 computer -- which OTB decries.
• A white boy alone on a laptop is not a revolutionary. He is often a libertarian of the Ayn Rand persuasion, which edges into the kind of ubermensch fascism, and demagoguery, and feeding frenzy, this world has had its fill of.
• The NYT is all over this, as is the rest of the traditional press.

I am amused, because that while the use of the intarwebs for barely body temp political journalism is news, the news created by the citizen papps is minuscule, and the trad press coverage is mostly industrial spying.

The virtue so far, I venture, of citizen journalism is the papp or opticon effect. But 300 people laboring to produce the bitter molehill strikes me as a brilliant illustration of what one law student's brilliant and revolutionary professor said. And that is, law review is a waste of the resources of the truly talented.

And there's the whole starfucking thing. Arianna Huffington has been famous for nearly 40 years as the number one starfucker in the world, truly prodigious, since her graduation from Cambridge. This kind of OTB gotcha starfucking gives amateurs (of which newsrooms themselves are totally full) a hardon to catch a politician making a basically harmless gaffe. It's feral and it's beneath the dignity of everyone who does it and everyone who is forced to read it. It keeps the candid and the teachable out of political office. It keeps young people, women and people of color, away from the polls in droves, which is the death of the democracy. If the Obama gaffe is to be the greatest all-time hit of OTB, I do believe the citizen papps are ultimately the minions of Fox and CNN.

I think citizen journos also repeat the worst sins of trad journalism. The most important is being solely driven by fake events, rather than focussing on systemic kleptocracy, for example, computer-enhanced data gathering (great reporting on redlining mortgages and other institutional crime stories derived from forensic geekery), and the system of environmental, economic, racial and sexist crimes committed with impunity by the institutions of democracy and capitalism. In citizen-oriented groups, be they juries, civic action groups, the book club, or online discussions, I have noticed that invariably the group is swayed to a wild goose chase, wasting years on the minuscule ego projects of the irrepressible while an overview of the scope of the work is, once again, obliterated as on CNN with a shitstorm of minutiae. It is a waste of the resources of the truly willing to learn, the truly willing to work, and of the truly willing to become political activists. It is my experience that without an institutional leader and institutional standards, the limited free time of those few citizens who are willing to volunteer is wasted. Those who have nothing else to do? Are unemployable for a reason. I think it was Tocqueville who said that in a democracy, scum rises to the top.

The second worst idea of trad journalism is that politics is news. Politics is reaction to the news, and as Dave Broder and others have taught me, even the news about politics is not where people think it is. It's basically in the governors' conferences, and has been since long before the dead hand of gridlock stopped Washington in its tracks. No face time for you on the TV networks.

That said, the intarwebs are the mother lode of real news about what's happening out here in the real world. I think the Obama New Yorker cover discussion is the tip of the iceberg of something really important, and if you were paying me $250 an hour, I'd figure it out for you, peg it, and lay out the story idea. The intarwebs are full of information I would be a much lesser person without, from the discovery of Aunt Cherie's book of poetry in the papers of the late poet laureate of Delaware, to the fire and brimstone sermons of an Ulster Presbyterian ancestor, to the papers of the mayor of Buffalo who shut down the tuberculosis sanatorium my mother was in in 1923.

It's also full of beautiful, informative websites by hobbyists and professionals about important American ideas and institutions, such as the 19th century Kirkbride mental hospitals, whose repurposing a young professional journalist is writing a story about.

These archives and hobbyist sites are to me the actual citizen journalism on the internet -- easily dismissed as feature stories or backwaters of archival trivia, but in reality the substance of the thing unseen. The next big social movements will rise from ideas and trends already visible on the nets. (See $250-an-hour disclaimer aforementioned.)

The Nick Lemann piece on citizen journalism (he is the Columbia J school dean) makes some of these points, a couple of years previous to the Mayhill Fowler bitter scoop. His main one is, the proof is in the pudding. Reporters get stories. Big ones. Like Abu Ghraib or how Enron was responsible for the California brownouts. No WMD. It's about massive, unrelenting, quotidien, life-and-death, white collar crime.

Gotcha just doesn't begin cut it. The story is not the stray brain fart. The story is the system. Limbaugh, Fox News, et al? Sucker punches. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And none to his water boy, OTB.

No Sedition Please, We're Black

Like everyone in the world, I rely on the sharp eye and sharp tongue and the talent of black Americans to critique the whiteboy culture by interposing its own.

That is a carefully composed and edited politically correct statement.

The fact is, black Americans already are the arbiters of taste in world culture, as the Tupac posters on the walls of shacks and omnimedia boardrooms all over the world testify.

Now come the instapundits on the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as Rush Limbaugh's worst nightmare:

There are many times and places where white people of good will should shut up. After due consideration, I submit that this is not one of them.

The instapundits of the black persuasion are saying that it's racist, not least because Michelle Obama is wearing an Afro. And that it wouldn't be racist, and would clearly be satire if a frame were put around it and it was depicted as a picture Rush Limbaugh is holding up. Or that there should be a mirror behind the Afro'ed Michelle and the Osama'd Barack showing what they really look like. Because you're too fucking stupid to get the joke.

No, people are saying that.

My first thought was, if black people lose their sense of humor, it's all over for us. Then I thought two things simultaneously, both the fruit of my long years in the feminist trenches. One, as women will never be equal until they commit great crimes, black people will never be equal until they have a vested interest over which to lose their sense of humor. When black people start being President and stop being hip, they will lose their sense of humor and take another step toward parity. Second, as everyone who has studied comedy knows, it is aggressive, nihilist, hostile and resilient. It has been, since Euripides. It makes nothing out of something. And along these lines, I'm thinking, Obama is a humor free zone because every black person is so worried about his assassination that any hostile attack, especially including humor, is seen as danger. I feel bad about this.

Not bad enough to shut up.

Because wit is the only thing -- the glimmer of some kind of light on -- that gives me hope for this country. It's why I keep on here in the blogosphere, despite the massive waves of bullshit and idiocy, because there are about 10 of you out there who have some wit and are applying it to this tired old world.

The idea that you need to put a frame around the New Yorker cartoon cover, or mirror it, in order to make it clear that it's satire, is stupid. Nobody in this culture, who watches 150 television ads a day, which are the most sophisticated video art there is, produced by the best educated filmn and art school grads, is that ill-educated visually. Even people who can't read or don't are extremely sophisticated in terms of seeing art in media, and indeed style, as well as reality, in the streets. I saw old black ladies, for example, back in the 1980s, wearing Bart Simpson t shirts, at which point I understood the Simpsons were hip and I needed to check it out.

The frame the insta pundits are insisting on to identify the cartoon as satire already exists. The New Yorker logo superimposed over it is the frame. Whether or not you are ignorant of the fact that every week since the 1920s the New Yorker has published a cartoon on its cover. If you have never seen the The New Yorker before, and you know nothing about the many things it stands for, some of them, like John Updike and the whole school of suburban adultery literature, completely loathsome and retrogressive and sexist and racist, you will dig that a drawing which is a caricature (you can tell by the big heads) of the candidate for the presidency and his wife in funny costumes with the words THE NEW YORKER over the top contains, shall we say, at least one clue that this is satire.

The instapundit blather that most annoyed me was that giving satire Michele an Afro is racist, because it's supposed to make her scary. Uh, yeah. I know hair is a huge issue for black women but art history of the image of the female Afro since the 1960s ranges from Angela Davis (which Afro, GIVEN THE HUEY NEWTON STYLE AK 47 the satirical Michele is packing on the cover, numb nuts, is the Afro The New Yorker references), and the close shaved ones of '60s people like Pearl Cleage, up through the blaxploitation chick Afro hair, which was and remains gorgeous and funny, the 1980s topiary effects of Grace Jones which any human in their right mind would covet, Alek Wek's millenial riposte to Naomi Campbell's retromingent weave, etc. -- oh please, I just can't go on.

And if the idiots who think Obama is a Muslim buy the magazine looking for evidence that he is, high fives all around.

As the Undercover Black Man, aka David Mills, said, years ago, when Ted Danson showed up in blackface at a roast for his then-sweetheart, Whoopi Goldberg, but what if it's funny?

But what if it's funny?

Now that is seditious. Can't have no sedition 'round here. Mama don't 'low no sedition 'round here.

Old Babes

The latest issue of Cottage Living, a very strange ladies' magazine headquartered in Alabama somewhere, which hits a certain femme sweet spot in an aspirational kind of derriere-garde Tri-Delt way in which Utopia is, actually, one of those darlin' Disney housing tracts -- the architecture, as one scholar calls it, of reassurance -- has a feature this month on Julie Newmar.

Julie Newmar, as I recall from fleetingly glimpsed 60s vignettes in My Living Doll, a Jeannie/Bewitched knockoff in which Newmar played a fembot, was tall and smart and kinda wiggy. Was there something, back in the day, about her being six-foot-two and a MENSA member? In any case, she was always cast as an uberwench. Hollywood sort of got her and sort of didn't. Broadway too. She won a Tony in 1961, and Joe Papp fired her in 1973 from a Broadway production (The Boom Boom Room) in which she played "a bisexual go-go dance captain". She took it like a sport. Papp said, admiringly, "She had something. A bizarre, grandiose stage presence. If I had directed her earlier...." The other person Papp had fired from the production was the female director. Papp continued, "She needs a man directing her."

Newmar is now in her 70s and nothing has changed. The Cottage Living spread shows her standing in the middle distance in her garden, looking beautiful and very, very thin -- still maintaining the classic Hollywood silhouette of huge head and stick body.

http://www.cottageliving.com/cottage/gardens/article/0,21135,1812477,00.html

Her garden is unbelievably beautiful. There are roses and lilies and orchids named after Julie, and she grows them. It is impressive, and so is she for making it.

And I think of femme secession, of old people retiring into their gardens and making a world there. I think about Tasha Tudor, who died recently, who made a whole child's illustrated world of her desire to live in the 1830s. She dressed up and lived, somewhat seceded yet aggressively marketed by her family in all the twee ladies' magazines, until she was 90 years old.

Newmar has not lived quite such a hermit's life. She is a California girl, born and raised in LA. She was widowed young and has a deaf son with Down's syndrome. She had a long aggressive feud with her neighbor, Jim Belushi, trying to run him off.

Her house is, according to the architectural rendering in Cottage Living, quite modest but CL thinks a lot of things are cottages which are not.

The layers of climbing, blooming greens all but obscure Julie's modest 1940s house, which she fell for in the early 1980s because violets sprouted in the drive. "'Pick me! Smell me! Embrace me!' they cried. So I did," she says, smiling.

Cottage Living says she is a busy actress, investing in real estate and travelling. This does not sound busy to me. Asked where she'd been since Catwoman in the 1960s Batman, she told the New York Times, "I would prefer being a producer, someone who shows the way, rather than one at the end of puppet strings, who has to work so hard. It's not worth it anymore. And being a mother and businesswoman are major tests in life. You just can't be a movie star."

She has a blog, not a bad one, either. It's quite good. She writes of trying to get into Gaza to a school for the deaf. She writes she is unable now to walk without assistance. She writes about having sex.

There is not one comment on any of the posts.

http://jezebel.com/350059/meow

Flying to Liberia

I remember the days of one narrative. It came down to my history teacher in high school. Or maybe it was geography. He also taught drivers' ed and coached something. He had a flat top, the mouth of a shark, and a slim waist under those polo shirts. I could have thrown him farther than I trusted him, and it was in his class that I decided history was boring because it was a lie.

Two years later, perhaps, I discovered, in the novels of Virginia Woolf, the phrase which explained it all to me:

                Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy --
                that was what she was thinking, this was
                what she was doing -- ladling out soup --
                she felt, more and more strongly, outside
                that eddy.... (To the Lighthouse)

I got into the newspaper business just as the then New Journalism was cutting to the chase and showing, on deadline, dictated from notes, that objective journalism was a whiteboy narrative and that there were alternate points of view. One such story by me, emphasizing the different camera angles a camera crew used to frame the rich felon who'd hired them on his big night (Joe Hirshhorn, opening his museum) was anthologized not least, I think now, because of the implication that objectivity was scientifically possible as long as three angles were described. And also I jumped into his Valiant limo without permission and got some great quotes.

I was flying over the CIA the other day, courtesy of Google Earth, and the Empire State building, trying to get my Mohammed Atta on, and found it quite impossible. The CIA building -- well it's flat, for starters, and well-contextualized by the two notes people have left on it. One says, I posted here a list of all the military bases on the planet but it has been deleted. The other says, here's a link to the list of all the military bases on the planet.

The Empire State building is invisible on account of the little bullet or camera icons indicating a link to a photograph taken from or of the spot.

Flying to Liberia brought me to tears, for many reasons. Not least that you can't zoom into Gbarnga -- or indeed any third world street address that I've tried -- and there is a bullet indicating a link over Gbarnga. It says it was Charles Taylor's headquarters during the Liberian civil war; Gbarnga is also the location of one of my earliest philosophical insights. It's about mediation. I was four. And one of the gifts of Africa is that you take things seriously from the beginning. I want to write a book about it, and I've been saving material for it ever since I woke up one day like 20 years ago with a phrase, one I have only slowly come to understand, on my lips: One thing I know about you is Africa.

So I fly Air Google over Liberia and see the red clay earth and the bush, and the rutted red clay roads, and the girdled rubber trees at the plantation, and smell the wood smoke. I read that Cuttington College was completely destroyed in the wars. I know, without knowing any facts, that Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson and Samuel Doe were covered by the American newspapers as the apotheosis of blood diamond, wig-wearing, Qaddafi-sponsored, snuff video posing, child-soldier-conscripting, big black very very bad niggers, the first of the new wave of barbarians. I know because I read, years ago, about the Doe snuff video in Vanity Fair magazine. A story about big black very very bad niggers passes for hard-hitting journalism at Vanity Fair. Because snuff videos? Do not lie. And they're so hott.

And I dig out the book about them from my one-thing-I-know-about-you-is-Africa carton -- it is one of my desert island possessions. And the first thing it says is, even African-American reporters depicted these guys as motiveless malignants. Whereas any old Third World hand would, as I did, look at the wigs and not get freaked -- and it does seem the gender bend really shook reporters to their toes. A Third World hand would say, oh sure, they're confusing the hungry ghosts by posing as girls.  Everybody who knows one thing about Africa knows that.

And that, precisely, is what the book I began to read yesterday by a very even-handed Africanist, called Stephen Ellis, is slowly and meticulously beginning to say. He quotes the coverage of these warriors by the black reporter Keith Richburg -- who draws them, in their flowered shower caps and skirts, Ellis writes, in typically non-judgemental prose, as "inexplicable". What's tragic about this, and Richburg's interesting saga away from sentimental Afro-philia, is that African-American reporters were thought to be less judgemental about big black very very bad niggers. Calling their religion "magic", and their jihad inexplicable, would be something somebody with a degree in Afro-American studies -- even if only from the university of DWB -- might be thought to avoid. Richburg's own saga, Out of America, is not atypical, and not atypically, he got skewered by African-Americans patriotic to Epcot Africa. Exile is, as everyone who knows even one thing about Africa, knows, a place in the imagination.

http://www.thetheatreaddict.com/blogpics/lovestory.jpg

The paper today, by which I mean the New York Times, has two stories which acknowledge or imply the Rashomon angle of the news. This didn't used to happen. And it doesn't happen on video, which holds out the same fallacious bonafide the anthology people liked about my little Hirshhorn story, and what editors and terrorists alike like about snuff videos. Reporters are cameras. And cameras do not lie.

One of them is about the situation on the ground in Iraq. Really good reporting indicates the existence of several different narratives, including, between the lines, the actionably bad war the Americans have fought, the jeopardy they've put the people of Iraq into by sheer incompetence. The line in graf 47, or whatever it is, about the great success they've had in reducing the smuggling of oil by "mafias" by establishing checkpoints.

You're telling me there haven't been checkpoints along all the oil-truck routes since day one?

And the security of the entire nation depends on oil revenues devolving to the government? Our stated purpose for being there and "liberating" them?

The other is the competing narratives on why the price of oil has reached historic highs. The American Petroleum Institute, which is, trust me, not your friend, is now on televsion claiming that union pension funds, if you're a Democrat, and hedge funds, if you're a plutocrat, are investing in commodities and driving up the price of oil. This, as the piece points out, is a stone lie.

Because, well, everybody who knows even just one thing about Africa knows that.

Dumb & Ugly

The prospect of being old for 40 years is a daunting one.

There's always suicide, which I last thought about consistently through my twenties. Nothing was bad enough to warrant it, and indeed the onset of life-threatening problems showed it for the Suzy Creamcheese amenity it is and banished all thought of it as the resilience genes clicked in.

A black parent once summed up what he didn't want in terms of education for his little girl -- that she shouldn't be made, in white majority schools, to feel dumb and ugly.

Add handicapped -- sight and hearing an effort, getting up and walking a pain -- and you've got 40 years of old age.

I was just watching Martha Stewart who had a feature on how fabulous it is to be a woman of 50, and it's true. You know who you are, the resilience gene has kicked in (if it hasn't, you're not going to be on television talking about how great it is to be 50), your children have disappeared (ooops!), and you are left with the prospect of another 50 years of creativity.

The creativity is the key. A life of the mind is the pre-requisite -- that is to say, you can live without the validation of being good-looking. Because there is a point where you become invisible and also mute. Men, including gay ones, simply do not hear what you have to say -- one reason I've had so many problems with the mice infestation. The exterminator, like all men of his class, stopped listening to me when I was about 44 years old. You have to hire a man to speak to these guys. That Hillary should claim them as her constituency is preposterous.

Creativity doesn't mean painting high art easel pictures. Although it can. It entails concatenation, contemplation, experimentation, and, I suspect, having your own nest arranged exactly as you see fit. I've never trusted a girl who didn't have her own functional nest, and the rubric of don't sleep with a man who doesn't own his own furniture eliminates about 50 per cent of the Mars and Venus problems from human communication. (If only I had followed this rule.)

Creativity entails a spiritual life. We all know people who wallow in the special effects of Epcot church ritual and emotional transaction without ever actually, you know, undertaking amendment and reform of their vicious lives. A belief in change and gratitude for everything, for that which does change, for that which does not change, are the only tools for enduring pleasure and resilience that I know of, and it has not been my experience that human will power can sustain either against the catastrophic blows, or the little ones that hurt you every time you stand up and walk across the room. There really isn't any defense against any of the atrocities. Except the kind of delusion you see people in their forties and fifties electing to embrace, the one summed up for me by the vision in the movie, Death in Venice, of the mini-me-sized playboy, dressed exactly like our hero, flirting with the boys on the boat, his cheeks just a touch too heavily rouged. The Spanish have a nicely medieval turn of phrase for such an one -- a viejo verde.

Change entails willingness, which is hard to calibrate when you're also mustering ignorance of pain and debility. That's not true, actually, willingness, as opposed to will, is what makes the pain go away.

Isolation is the inescapable companion of 40 years of old age. I watch the people who live together in the old peoples' gulag and see each other every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Half of them, if not all of them, are demented <i>because</i> of isolation. My mother stopped seeing her last faithful friend 30 years ago. I finally asked her why. She said her husband made a pass. And I have seen the difficulty of keeping up with friendships outgrown -- people do get bent out of shape by parenthood, bad marriages, the vicissitudes of their profession -- and the difficulty of making new friends dumb and ugly.

Coupling seems to be the most delusionary action to take in old age. My observation is that it's only available to women who are willing very seriously to strangle any signs of life or wisdom they've accrued -- the viejas verdes. I'm recovering my eight-year-old's sense of how very strange, what an enormity, sex is. I've just been reading about what John McCain did to his first wife, who had survived an awful accident while he was in POW camp, shrank four inches as surgeons removed bone, gained weight, and, not incidentally, turned 40. Toast. And this is the quotidian, just the way it is, not the monstrous.

Isolation as dealt with by the nursing homes, I don't know. You can't believe the number of losers who come there peddling their dreadful wares to a captive audience, from the creepy ministers to the folk singers and infantilizing potters. Oh jeez.

That's the big one. It's not a hundred years of solitude. Only 50. That's big.

Erving Goffman years ago studied the management of spoiled identity and stilll has a lot to teach. I'm going to think about him. And about the very ancient ladies I saw sitting on the benches in the median at about 103rd and Broadway, all dressed up and made up.

Cities, public space, the amenities of the agora, of pedestrians, all of which are under sustained attack by neo-liberals, are made for old people. Is being surrounded by the love of strangers the real solution? I think it is. The Hindu nomad was advised, as he set off on the third, hermitage ashram of Hindu life, Let India take care of you.

Mattie Breedlove, with her swept yard and rare heirloom rose, Heirloom Rose catalog, ca. 1991.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Space-Hidden-African-American/dp/1572333561/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199895&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Your-Head-Sky-Interpreting/dp/0813918243/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199965&sr=1-2

-- Jeannette Smyth