Smells Like Teen Spirit

Emotions have been running a bit high in the news media these past few days. In case you didn't know, a black ex-Navy Reservist ex-cop posted a manifesto and killed some people. He is now dead, presumably from a self inflicted gunshot after a siege, but there are some questions as to whether the L.A.P.D. conducted themselves in a strictly legal manner or not. Politicians on both sides are trying to figure out how to use this, for gun control, the race debate, due process, veteran care etc. In the meantime, innocent people are dead and we won't ever get the whole truth because you can't try a corpse, but America doesn't care about that so much because the whole thing has the makings of a great story. A dark, edgy anti-hero wronged by The Man, fighting for justice until he met his fiery end is truly compelling stuff, so we'll roll with that. The news media knows this, so that's what they will give us. It doesn't matter if the truth reveals some gaping plot holes in their narrative, they will omit and ignore facts that don't fit the storyline they want, which is really the storyline we want.

Journalists claim that they aren't in it for the story. They claim they are the fearless, unsung heroes on the front lines fighting a grim, ugly war with greedy capitalists and power mongers alike, ferreting out the Truth, defying the status quo, bringing balance and perspective to the fore,  defending the defenseless with the power of the pen, the mike, the poignant question, the headline and the teaser (tonight at 9!). It turns out, though, that Truth doesn't sell ad spots. Stories do. Conservatives love to vilify the "liberal media," and liberals adore cursing Fox News and radio talk shows, but the truth is that no news outlet has an opinion. They do have a bottom line, employees to pay, expenses to write off, and hungry tummies that need to be filled. The media is simply a market that sells to consumers and those consumers happen to be liberals and conservatives. The media will tell us what we want to hear, according to the market they serve, because if they don't we will stop listening to them and they will have no jobs. Therefore, they will brand themselves as investigative journalists and chase the emotional stories, the powerful stories, the stories that tell you how your side is the bright, shining beacon of good sense and the other side is full of selfish, misguided demagogues. If it turns out that the girlfriend with leukemia that died in a car accident wasn't real, or the cycling cancer survivor was 'roiding, or the blue collar hero who stood up to a Presidential candidate didn't actually have a plumbing license, well, we'll ignore it for as long as possible. Those things ruin the story, you see. It seems it's only a matter of time before CNN cuts a deal with Jerry Bruckheimer.

I've heard people scoff at fiction. They scorn the genre novel as a waste of paper/pixels. They deride the people who read that stuff as delusional escapists, and claim they personally don't have time to be entertained. It's a farce, of course, and the media knows it. "Here we are now," we shout, fist fulls of money raised high, "Entertain us!" and the news media will always oblige. If you want to be outraged they will douse you in vitriol, if you want your heart to be warmed they will smother you with perseverance and honesty and cuddly puppies who beat the odds. You can find all of those things in fiction as well, but the difference is that authors are honest about their dishonesty; we admit that our stories are lies. It's up to you to decide who you buy your lies from.

Motivation

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about value and worth as they relate to our commodities of time and money, but I’d rather not write about that today. I’d like that idea to marinate for a while longer, and hopefully I will soon have something cohesive to say about the subject, perhaps something earth shattering and inspirational. Today is not that day.

Instead I have something slightly related that has been both lurking in the back of my mind and just leaped out at me a half hour ago as I was reading Shelley for my Brit Lit class.

Why do we write?

If we want to be boring the answer is obvious. We write because we want to communicate our ideas, but there are a hundred more ideas tied to this conceit (yes, exactly 100. I counted them). Why do we want to communicate? Which ideas? What makes us think these ideas are worth communicating? Are you getting some kind of validation from writing? Do you want to change the way people think? Do you want to make them happy, make them afraid, do you want to entertain? To inform? Why? Why?

Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake, all three were poets who wrote in rebellion to John Locke and Cartesian Dualism which is fine, but notice that Locke and Descartes were philosophers, not poets. Philosophers shaped the world these three railed against, and philosophers shaped it after. If you really want to change the world with a Liberal Arts degree, the English department is not the place to start! Shelley wanted to fight injustice, but again, he was a poet. When you hear about the movers and shakers of social reform his name is not on the list. Wilberforce is there. Shelley isn’t. If social justice was his aim then politics may have been a more efficient choice. We see that poets don’t change anything. At best they serve as a marker of the times, showing what some people were thinking during the French Revolution, for example.

I think of the writers that I have met and talked to, and there is no uniform answer to the question from them. Writers are creative people, we do things without questioning it and this is often the point; we express our thought and/or emotion and throw it out before pausing to modify them, edit them, make them fit into social norms that people can look at and read and wear without feeling uncomfortable. If we knew what it was that we were saying or doing and why we would be tempted to temper it down because we also tend to be needy, we crave acceptance just like anyone else. When we are afraid that our art is too much we worry, we try to change it, and it becomes something that it shouldn’t have been. What I am trying to say is that most artists, writers included, have no clue why we do what we do and this is a good thing. When you ask us we will come up with some silly answer (like the one above) that we may or may not believe ourselves, but we don’t really know.

Maybe a better question for me is “why do they make me read Shelley?”