As the bells toll
When sources abound, our fiction becomes untenable, no matter how much the active parties might’ve clung to their own fictions for the sake of career and sanity. To write coherent post-literate pre-library-burning history is to ascribe motives glibly in the text and dispute or overturn them in the footnotes. (Which is why footnotes are often where the most interesting writing is.)
– Ray Davis
A partial response to a most eloquent piece by Ray Davis a few days back.
I heard a very interesting theory the other night about the state of journalism and historical reporting.
It goes that, in situations like the genocide in Rwanda, the events taking place are so extreme, so contrary to what we want to believe of ourselves, that we cannot accept them. If we cannot accept them, we cannot look and we cannot ask questions. Hence the lack of reporting.
In that particular case, journalists came in once the damage had been done, and those victims who could have shed some light were by then empty shells with nothing to barter, and the perpetrators so brutalized by their “cause” that what they had to say left us dumbstruck, so near incapable of reporting.
The journalist’s (and perhaps historian’s) job is to answer questions – in theory his or her readers’ questions. If the readers are no longer capable of asking questions, the journalist becomes increasingly like a fiction writer, asking and answering her own questions.
In times of crisis and media silence, the only clear perspective of the situation we will get will be from fiction writers. A lovely case in point being writers like Bulgakov in post-revolutionary Russia.
Torture, I think, is most often written about long after the fact, once the urgency of addressing it has died down, and we’re coming to terms in retrospect with something we think can no longer touch us. We see it as an isolated event, disregarding the fact that it has never once paused for a breath.
The only torture we speak of in the moment is the torture that suits our propagandist purposes (for want of a better word), and still it’s in rather vague terms: we shelter people from the gory images, and speak only summarily about them in print. It’s self-censorship, shielding ourselves from our true nature.
What the politicians don’t seem to grasp is that we are not just a bunch of TV-numbed fools; we’re continually in the throes of reality, continually required to fend for ourselves. And we know it.
And so instead of addressing the media in a bid to obscure reality, they’d do well to address reality itself. As for us, instead of fretting about what servile mouthpieces certain media outlets are, we’d do better to fret about reality.
What’s important is what is happening, not the way it is being reported.
I’ve been re-reading The Education of Henry Adams, along with a number of grim eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because I think we need a combination of the passionate voices of witnesses and the dispassionate perspective of historians to clearly view and measure our progress.
History can teach us a great deal, but only if we have the desire to listen. We pervert the lessons by drawing silly comparisons between discomforts in the present and true nightmares of the past. And content ourselves with being indignant.
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Comment
- Yeah. We keep throwing around terms like facism and totalitarian and the crowd goes wild but we have no conception of what it’s like to live under those regimes.
We’re fat and spoilt and not getting any more pissed about the fucking mess, or growing mess, we’re in than about how much we hate the latest crap movie.
— MLP Oct 5, 2:31pm # - “What’s important is what is happening, not the way it is being reported.”†
Most apt.‡
—
†The way it’s being reported is a strong indicator, possibly more accurate than the reportage itself, of what’s happening. It’s information, like a kid talking about a playground incident gives up volumes of readable info, including accurate system states, presence of not-yet-articulable-problems, levels of social integration, and (breath) recent food intake.
Still, exclusively focusing on people like Coulter and O’Reilly or the tailless and terminal Limbaugh, is yes, diversionary, and a kind of shirking.
‡Torture in the moment is a hard subject. There’s a guy right now in Minas Gerais who’s just caught the whiff of his own treachery, the people he sold out, and the long steady rhythm of their presence drowned in the predator triumph of D-8’s and chainsaws. He’s tortured horribly by that, though maybe only for as long as it takes to connect with some serious toxins.
The qualitative weight of that torment is massive.
Here’s a link to some contemporary torture that fits your bill of selective denunciation¹, the Bushmen, so-called, brutally driven from their deep ancestry, to make way for tourist-income-generating game parks, which may well up the odds for some at least of the skittering and about-to-vanish animal coteries of Botswana:
http://www.survival-international.org/bushman_statements_relocate.htm
1. Don’t all our compasses point toward the same unseen pole?
— msg Oct 5, 5:15pm # - “We pervert the lessons by drawing silly comparisons between discomforts in the present and true nightmares of the past.”
Sometimes the feeling that you describe frustrates me, as it implies that I have no right to talk about my parents who lived both under Nazi and Stalinist occupation. And what about my own not at all outstanding Soviet life? Would you deny me right to draw comparisions from there either?
— Aet Tõnissoo Oct 10, 6:11am # - Far be it from me to deny anyone anything.
I was referring to people living in relatively free societies, and who have no real knowledge of totalitarian regimes (either first or second hand), abdicating their potential power and labelling policies that make them uncomfortable as fascist or Stalinist or whatever. (Contenting themselves with their emotional/intellectual opposition, and unable to see the irony.)
If you, with your perspective, do perceive true parallels, they should indeed be expressed with urgency.
— gail Oct 10, 11:16am # - Hi. Good points.
One kind of obvious thought—another reason for the lack of reporting in Rwanda is reporting from a genocide zone can get you killed.
— IB Bill Oct 13, 5:50pm # - And yet they rush and jostle to get into a (highly publicized) war zone.
— gail Oct 14, 5:36am #
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