Purely out of curiosity...

[Monte Davis]

Check out  these "Retro Report" videos for some thoughtful revisits to
media feeding frenzies -- many with political/ideological components --
through the TV and Internet years: crack babies, Ruby Ridge, health hazards
of power lines, McDonald's too-hot coffee, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/retro-report

I'm in sympathy with both the Thibodeau and Bailey PoVs here: yes, for
those pre-sensitized to GWOT and "profiling" excesses, the original story
was a perfect storm of outrage... *and* yes, for those pre-sensitized to
@$#% ambulance-chasing lawyers, the lawsuit sounds over the top.

Circa 1980, Love Canal was in the news: the neighborhood near Niagara Falls
where seepage from an old Hooker Chemical waste dump had (maybe) been
damaging the health of residents. It was the "poster child" story for
environmental activism, and contributed greatly to the passage of the
Superfund cleanup law. I did a column for Discover magazine exploring some
complications: that the 1940s waste dump had been well-built even by 1980
standards... that the town (wanting land for a new school) had threatened
Hooker with eminent domain to acquire it despite Hooker's repeated
warnings... and then sold off part of the parcel *without* warnings to
residential developers who scraped off the clay cap, ran utility cuts
through the waste trenches, etc.

There was no ideological argument at all in the column, just documented
fact -- but it drew more mail than everything else I published in 15+ years
of science writing, 95% to the effect that I must be a paid shill for Big
Chem, that I had no heart for the poor poisoned babies, that Gaia-rapers
like me would be first against the wall, and so forth. Given that my own
inclinations are pretty deep green, it was an education in What Must Not Be
Said.

There is a Pynchon angle here, y'know: his constant, pervasive, profoundly
ironic awareness of how experience is mythologized, simplified,
broad-brushed into historical narratives. Not just in the explicitly
"historical" V and GR and M&D and AtD, but in the more or less real time of
CoL49 or BE. You can feel 1965 Manhattan Beach turning into "the Sixties"
as it happened, weigh the self-serving twenty-years-after perspectives in
Vineland, check out the story-fication of 9/11 under way within weeks
(narrative time) of the event. Scarsdale Vibe's speech to LAHDIDA is both a
distillation of real robber-baron entitlement *and* a parodic exaggeration
of an indignant Knights of Labor version of a robber baron. For every
unreliable narrator there's a _hypocrite lecteur_ in the mirror.


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:57 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> As someone who works in the media I'd suggest you don't trust the
> reporting on this story too much. Compare: that big recent shaming of
> the "world's worst aunt" who sued her pre-teen nephew for $127,000
> after he hugged her and she fell over and broke her wrist. The real
> story there was about US healthcare and the fact that she couldn't
> receive any support unless she sued him, which she didn't want to do
> (apparently, allegedly, etcly).
>
> IMHO you don't go for $15 million damages because you've suffered $15
> million worth of damage. You go for it because of complicated and
> arcane legal counsel that is WAY too boring for journalists to dig
> into when they could just go for the easy clickbait instead.
> Seriously, which story are you going to read?
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 9:38 PM, Jemmy Bloocher <jbloocher at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I certainly don't anymore. Even if he had been grievously maligned, $15
> > million is a pretty obscene expectation.
> >
> > On 11 Dec 2015 10:29, "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> He doesn't deserve fiteen million dollars and won't get it. I' m glad he
> >> is moving happily enough.
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPad
> >>
> >> > On Dec 11, 2015, at 5:12 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >
> >> > ...does anybody on the P-List still think Ahmed the Clock Boy is a
> >> > totally innocent victim of brutally racist teachers who deserves 15
> million
> >> > dollars for the torture of being kept from his mommy and daddy for 85
> >> > minutes?
> >> >
> >> > Just curious if any of my fellow Pynchon fans are as disturbed by the
> >> > cult-like, knee-jerk, quasi-Pavlovian, ignore-all-contrary-evidence,
> Social
> >> > Justice Warrior conga line that has emerged on this topic.
> >> >
> >> > Seems to me a lot of my leftier-than-thou friends are acting like Fox
> >> > News conservatives, only in the ideological equivalent of
> photo-negative...
> >> > I mean, I count myself as a proud liberal, but I have to draw the
> line at
> >> > fucking lying to myself.
> >> >
> >> > Mark T.
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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