Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.
I was very busy in September, and I only finished reading two books. I didn’t realize until I began to write this entry what it was that the two books had in common. Here, look:
The first book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa” is by Michael Finkel, a former writer for the New York Times who was fired after being accused of inventing part of a story he wrote for the Sunday magazine section. This struck me as amusing and ironic, since I’ve always referred to the NY Times as “The Big Grey Pack of Lies,” although now that I’ve read Professor Frankfurt’s little book, I understand that it is actually “The Big Grey Pack of Bullshit.” (You can’t say that on the radio, though.)
In his book, Finkel describes writing the story that got him fired. He was assigned to write about the use of child slaves in cocoa production in Africa, but when he got to Africa he discovered that the story was pretty much a fabrication. Then, when he got home, his editors at the Times really, really, really wanted him to write the story from the point of view of one particular child cocoa worker—so Finkel invented a composite character and wrote the story, and then he got caught. He was home feeling sorry for himself when he got a call from a reporter in Portland who told him that a guy accused of murdering his family in Oregon had been apprehended in Mexico, where he was hiding out under the name “Michael Finkel from the New York Times.” This was so bizarre that Finkel got in touch with the guy and began a correspondence with him. The guy’s real name was Christian Longo, and although everyone is supposed to be entitled to the presumption of innocence, there is not one sentence in Finkel’s entire book that would lead you to believe that Longo was anything but guilty of the murder of his wife and three children. And yet, Finkel himself seems unsure of it all the way. He’s so flattered that some baby-killer would appropriate his identity that it’s not until he actually attends the trial, sees Longo in the courtroom, and picks up on the reaction of everybody else that he realizes that—quelle horreur!—Longo is probably a sociopathic mass murderer. Finkel himself comes across not as a bad guy, but just totally, terminally clueless.
The funny thing is that I read Finkel’s chocolate story at the time it came out, back when I was still getting the Sunday Times so I could do the crossword puzzle at night to put myself to sleep, and I didn’t believe a word of it at the time. It was clearly a fictionalized account, and I think it’s pretty ingenuous of Finkel’s editors to say they believed it and then they were shocked, SHOCKED to find out it wasn’t true. The New York Times is the only newspaper I know that’s ever had a regular magazine devoted to correcting their multiple mistruths—”Lies of Our Times,” which came out 10 times a year during the ’90s. Of course, in the time since Finkel got fired, there’s been the whole Jayson Blair affair, and now the Times can’t wait to tell you all the crap they’ve misled their readers with. Instead of just “corrections,” they now have an entire page of retractions and apologies with various headings such as “Corrections,” “For the Record,” and “Editors’ Notes.” They roll around in their own falsehoods and errors, covering themselves with ashes and rending their garments, when all they really need to do is just start printing the truth.
Here is a disclaimer and disclosure: I was once fired from a regular gig for calling the editors of the New York Times a bunch of xenophobic rubes. This was in 1998, and dear David Garland [www.wnyc.org/shows/spinning] gave me a few minutes on his show on WNYC every Thursday night to talk about whatever was on my mind, and when I talked about having been a topless dancer or driving to Connecticut and waiting in line to buy Powerball tickets, their morning show would pick it up and rebroadcast it and put it up on their Web site and give me money. "But when I started making fun of the things that are taken seriously by people who take NPR seriously, the panjandrums of 'NYC didn¹t like it. And when I came on one week and pointed out that the editors of the NY Times had not only plagiarized a comedy Web site that made fun of the way Chinese people speak, but apparently didn’t even realize it was supposed to be funny (although it wasn’t funny, it was racist), I called their editors a bunch of xenophobic rubes and the next thing I knew the station manager decided I was “too disruptive for Thursday nights” and got rid of me. He was right: I WAS too disruptive for Thursday nights, or for any elitist institution looking for their pet Articulate Inferior, the underprivileged person who has lived through poverty and cultural deprivation and is willing to confirm all the elite’s assumptions about such a life by writing a National-Book-Award-nominated novel about it—or doing radio commentary about being a topless dancer. Don’t worry, I knew what I was doing, and I wanted their money, and I could have written lots more of exactly what they wanted to hear. But I didn’t.
Today I went looking for the text of what I said on David Garland’s radio show that got me fired, so I could post it here, but that was a long time ago and I can’t find it now. I found a bunch of other ones, though and, reading them for the first time in years, I’m ASTONISHED that WNYC left me on the air as long as they did. What a bag of snot am I! And now, after all these years, I finally understand the New York Times a little better, thanks to Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Princeton. His wee little 67-page book with the wide, white page margins is unavoidably academic—”academic” being something I’ve always thought was a near-synonym for “bullshit”—but it’s still quite amusing, and very brief.
The lack of a coherent theory of bullshit appears to have bothered Professor Frankfurt, so he decided to “articulate ... the structure of its content”— in other words, to define it. This he does in such a careful, easy-to-follow manner that I wasn’t put off even when he got into Wittgenstein by page 19. (I hope Professor Frankfurt’s next book will revisit Wittgenstein. He can call it, “On Assholes.”) He considers the difference between humbug, lying, bluffing, and bullshit, and towards the end the good professor writes: “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least about everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe ... for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.”
I have no idea what a “conscientious moral agent” is, but to me this really helps explain the New York Times, and for that I’m grateful.
Since our income malfunction seems to have become a permanent state of affairs, I have been reading only books I can get from our little local public library, but I have put Prof. Frankfurt’s book on my short list of Books I Want to Buy if We Ever Have Any Money Again, because I think it’s one worth owning.
Thanks for reading my blog entry this week, and may God bless.
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