Stenches of Progress
Though I am frequently in the habit of crushing people’s dreams, it would be a lie to pretend Vila’s suggestion that I be in charge of a rabble-rousing, inflammatory, contrarian, and downright outrageous magazine didn’t cross my mind plenty of times. I carry romantic notions of being a scribe, before the obligatory candle-lit desk, scribbling and dispatching parcels of wisdom to living rooms across the world. Isn’t that why people blog? We get to be the editors, the reporters, and the researchers of our own lives for a theoretically infinite audience. Hell, my posting frequency of late is about the same as that of an editor, no? Once a month, always on schedule.
But I’m talking about serious work. The angry editor. Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harpers magazine, is the template here. His recent retirement brought an end to a good four years of outright vitriol in his Notebook column, during which the most outrageous nadirs of the Bush administration’s deceitful tenure sent him into shuddering paroxysms of highly literate rage. It was the first page I turned to in every issue, because I love rage. He was repetitive and prone to hyperbole, but dammit, if things need to be said, I don’t mind him saying them over and over in the angriest ways possible. If a man’s got fire in his gut I say let him breathe even if it all sounds the same. The conflagration is what matters.
Media, though, that’s what I have doubts about. Media pundits will tell you that in the marketplace of ideas, the most valuable ones are those which are heard by the many as opposed to the few. Without media, they say, we would all be shouting out windows at each other and having the town herald bark the news of the impending Bolshevik invasion through his little tin horn. If we accept as a fact that a good majority of the opinion-media shouts each other into irrelevance, left-and-right, O’Reilly and Franken, Post and Globe, like the cancelling of out-of-phase sound waves, those few potent voices left over have promise for real societal benefit, don’t they?
Let me drop a quote from my man Hank aka Henry Miller.
We (Americans) take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish—I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.
Good point, Hank. For example, I command my Canadian readers to take a good long look at the headlines trickling in on the CBC Canada Votes page (a very helpful page, I might add), and try to find the items which are not devoted to reporting a permutation of the aforementioned job solipsism lamented by Mr. Miller. Presently, there is a story about Gilles Duceppe telling the press that Paul Martin should ease up on his criticisms of the American government, and instead “take action” on issues such as softwood lumber, as if criticism and action are mutually exclusive. And, softwood lumber, you say? Well, funny that Gilly D would mention that, because Quebec happens to be one of the top provinces for producing said lumber, and several of the country’s most important pulp and paper operations are located here, and they haven’t been doing so well lately with the rising energy costs and uppity $CDN and all, and did I mention the Bloc Quebecois only cares about winning ridings in La Belle Province?
Scroll down for a piece on Paul Martin’s reluctance toward Senate reform, due to the obvious fact that the phrase “constitutional reform” brings back memories of Meech and Charlottetown, Levesque and Trudeau’s little whodunnit, and later, a little rally in Montreal. Martin might be a grey-haired charlatan in a cheap suit, but he’s no idiot. He has an election to win and a job to preserve, and would sooner eat a baby on live TV than open the Constitutional Question (and thus the National Questions of certain provinces) right now.
Okay, so it’s election time, and these are low-hanging fruit. They’ll be hucking their wares every chance they get. Politics is obviously the worst offender in the keep-your-job sweepstakes, but if politics is not your thing, feel free to peruse other, equally meaningless things, such as best-of-the-year lists and awards ceremonies (to “promote art” and, hey, boost sales), for no good reason at all, Mariah Carey.
The fundamental truth about media: it sells something. Always. Sometimes good things, but often bad. It sells issues, ads, tickets, and subscriptions. It peddles values, attitudes, images, and styles. It trafficks in political grandstanding, outrage, diplomacy, and progress. And smut, while I’m on a roll. These things are not bad or good, nor is their sale. Rather, they compose a totality of sensory data plugged into every emotion and thought that a human being could ever have, and the whole thing crashes down on the public every time they tune in. Processing it all with any nuance or comfort is like trying to discern individual droplets in a tidal wave. We live in the most fascinating and all-pervading culture the world has ever known, but the deeper you drill into it, the more a lot of it appears a surface-level phenomenon. Do you ever read old books, or historical anecdotes, and see fundamental patterns of human behaviour repeating themselves perfectly in the present day? Shakespearean tragedies acted out in real life? Doesn’t it feel like it’s all been done before? Where’s the wisdom? Where’s the universality in the deluge, and why isn’t the media more interested in talking about it? All I see are events and video clips scrolling by, and I don’t know how to proceed. Jean Baudrillard nails the feeling:
You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can’t disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.
So, is the media for me? I’m not sure. I suppose a few deadlines could be good for me. Writing is never bad, nor is people reading it. Anything more complicated than that begins to sound like “progress” again. Deadlines, funding, advertising, the “target market”, the messy, ugly things that inhibit and dilute all media. I am an insufferable purist, but also a realist. It’s easier to seethe than to act, and more fun too. I don’t know, I’m working these things out slowly, in the times between spasmodic reloads of news websites. Have to get back to you.
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(4 comments)
Nick, I’m thinking you have a moral obligation to infiltrate the world of Journalism with your purist ideals. In an industry where editorial content is an exact reflection of advertising dollars, and where stories are in fact sold against ads, some of your ‘insufferable’ realistic purism just might be a refreshing change!
yeah, post more.
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