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.
