NP Hitchens

[pynchonoid]

Just to keep the Hitchens-worship in perspective
before it gets completely out of hand:


MATT TAIBBI

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would
almost be to promote those terms to the level of
respectability. To describe this film as a piece of
crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that
would never again rise above the excremental...
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral
frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in
seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject
political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration
of "dissenting" bravery.
—Christopher Hitchens, Slate.com, on Michael Moore


Well, that's rich, isn't it? Christopher Hitchens
crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce
Michael Moore as a coward. I can't imagine anything
more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the
foot of a medical school cadaver.

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know
it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were
any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would
be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over
Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state,
make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of
fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh:
I dare anyone in our business to say that that
wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies
than the actual fruits of our labor.

No one among us is going to throw that first stone,
though. Not even Chris Hitchens, a man who makes a
neat living completing advanced Highlights for
Children exercises like the following: "Denounce a
like-minded colleague, using the words 'Lugubrious'
and 'Semienvious.'" Such is the pretense of modern
journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a
man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many
times, he can't close his eyes without opening his
mouth. By a man who, if the Soviets had won the Cold
War, would be writing breathless features on Eduard
Shevardnadze for three bucks a word in Komsomolskaya
Vanity Fair ("Georgia on His Mind: Edik Speaks Out."
Photos by Annie Liebowitz...).

Which is fine, good luck to him, mazel tov.
Everybody's got to make a living. But let's not leave
people confused out there. The idea that anyone in
today's media is either courageous or cowardly on the
basis of what they write or broadcast is ridiculous.

Hitchens, like me and everyone else out there
publishing, lives in a professional world where the
idea of courage is submitting nice words about George
Bush to the Nation, or maybe a "Rethinking Welfare
Reform" piece to the Wall Street Journal. What
Hitchens calls courage is really a willingness to
offend one's intellectual constituency, and what he
really means by that is honesty—something very
different from courage. It's a nice quality, honesty,
and the pundit out there who has it and still manages
to make a living is, I guess, to be applauded. But
again, let's not confuse that with courage.

Courage is a willingness to face real risks—your neck,
or at the very least, your job. The journalist with
courage would have threatened to resign rather than
repeat George Bush's justifications for invasion
before it began. I don't remember anyone resigning
last winter. The journalist with courage would
threaten to quit rather than do a magazine piece about
an advertiser's product, his fad diet book or his
magic-bullet baldness cure. It happens every day, and
nobody ever quits over it.

If journalists had courage, they would form unions and
refuse to work for any company that made decisions
about editorial content based on the bottom line, on
profit. Are there individual instances of reporters
who quit over this issue? Sure, there are a few.
Lowell Bergman walked out on 60 Minutes over this one.
And there were those Fox TV reporters in Tampa, Jane
Akre and Steve Wilson, who famously (and expensively,
as it turned out) fell on their swords rather than
broadcast a bunch of cuddly bullshit about the
Monsanto corporation.

Yes, there are a few isolated vertebrates out there in
our business. But it wasn't like the whole staff of
WTVT in Tampa walked out in support of Akre and
Wilson. Janitors stick up for each other. Steelworkers
stick up for each other. Even camera operators and
soundmen stick up for each other. But journalists just
sit still in their cubicles with their eyebrows
raised, waiting for it all to blow over, in those very
rare instances when a colleague walks the plank.

I've been around journalists my entire life, since I
was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in
three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from
shame before daring to say that their job had anything
to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in
the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens,
knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are
professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing
content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand,
cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for
toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into
the brains of the stupefied public.

One friend I know describes working in the media as
shoveling coal for Satan. That's about right. A worker
in a tampon factory has dignity: He just uses his
sweat to make a product, a useful product at that, and
doesn't lie to himself about what he does. In this
business we make commodities for sale and, for the
benefit of our consciences and our egos, we call them
ideas and truth. And then we go on the lecture
circuit. But in 99 cases out of 100, the public has
more to learn about humanity from the guy who makes
tampons.

I'm off on this tangent because I'm enraged by the
numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary,
"nuanced" criticism of Moore this week by the learned
priests of our business. (And no, I'm not overlooking
this newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and
impossible to like as a public figure, and a little
loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless
panderer. But he wouldn't be necessary if even one
percent of the rest of us had any balls at all.

If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq
Bush press conference last year and shouted,
"Bullshit!" it might have made a difference.

If even one network, instead of cheerily
re-broadcasting Pentagon-generated aerial bomb
footage, had risked its access to the government by
saying to the Bush administration, "We're not covering
the war unless we can shoot anything we want, without
restrictions," that might have made a difference. It
might have made this war look like what it
is—pointless death and carnage that would have scared
away every advertiser in the country—rather than a big
fucking football game that you can sell Coke and Pepsi
and Scott's Fertilizer to.

Where are the articles about the cowardice of those
people? Hitchens in his piece accuses Moore of errors
by omission: How come he isn't writing about the CNN
producers who every day show us gung-ho Army desert
rats instead of legless malcontents in the early
stages of a lifelong morphine addiction?

Yeah, well, we don't write about those people, because
they're just doing their jobs, whatever that means.
For some reason, we in the media can forgive that. We
just can't forgive it when someone does our jobs for
us. Say what you want about Moore, but he picked
himself up and did something, something approximating
the role journalism is supposed to play. The rest of
us—let's face it—are just souped-up shoe salesmen with
lit degrees. Who should shut their mouths in the
presence of real people.

Volume 17, Issue 26

© 2004 New York Press
http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=10524

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