The made up news

There’s a lot of fuss over the New York Times report that the federal agencies under the Bush administration spent a quarter billion dollars on fake news reports that they send out to “local” news organizations as actual news, when it’s actually a technicolor press release for the president’s favorite policies.

Me, I’m a concerned about my mother. She’s is a big fan of the news. No matter what I’ve told her about the lack of credibility of our local news organizations, she just loves our local reporters, their hairstyles and the touching stories about their families. She just loves them. Although she’s grown from a chirpy suburban Republican to a sharply observant Democrat over the span of the last generation, (based solely on her love for her own offspring, and her grandchildren), she still thinks that Pepsi is wholesome and that the news offerings are genuine. She thinks that that Katie Couric is just adorable.

While I have spent most of the last few years quietly avoiding local news as completely irrelevant, my mother has soaked up what they have to offer. While I comment that any corporate event for which you can buy a ticket for over $40.00 is news to her favorite local station, she has delighted in hearing about the 9News sponsored Parade Of Lights and the Grand Opening of the Pepsi Center. Like most of the United States she was transfixed by the war coverage...brought to you by the public relations arm of the Pentagon.

I had a job for a manufacturing plant once. I wrote press releases about our new products, and sometimes about products that weren’t new, or improved at all. The Director of Sales, a sharp eyed fellow that I actually respected explained it to me, “Just send it to the trade magazines, they’ll publish it.” “But it’s not news,” I offered, thinking that anything I put forward as news would have to be, well, news, not just a product advertisement disguised as news. It needed to be justifiable, researchable. I was wrong. He was right. They needed “news” to fill up their space and they don’t have the staff to research it and write it, we do. We. The businesses seeking to sell product to their readers. We have the time, the staff and the motive. We write the news.

Once I got past my own conscience with the explanation that I wasn’t working as a journalist, I was working as a marketer and it was the “journal’s” responsibility to uphold journalistic standards, I spent many happy hours creating what I considered to be totally bogus “press releases” that touted the benefits of our products. It was a lot like making up “journals” in college when I had neither the discipline nor the inclination to provide an actual journal to my professor. With my brief background in broadcasting and my flair for creative writing I felt it went rather well. I actually enjoyed writing “make believe news.”

And so, apparently do a lot of writers and public relations persons. I particularly like the story of the woman who is pretending to be a real life reporter and even using a fake reporter- name in her work for the Transportation Security Administration. She’s not just pretending to make up the news, she gets to pretend she’s giving the news; add acting to the creative writing skills and you’re really having a good time.

At my mother’s expense, of course.

My mother is the perfect consumer. She likes to be touched by human interest stories. She wants someone to tell her when something really is serious enough to worry about. She loves the feeling of belonging to a local community even if it’s a huge metro area. She sits down in front of that television at least as much for feeling as she does for information, and she doesn’t get her information from any other significant source.

How is my mother ever going to know how much they are lying to her and where is she going to go for the truth if she ever comes to terms with the deception?

Memorials

You see them all the time, along the roads and the highways; little crosses of wood or styrofoam, faded wreaths with ribbons hanging limply in the sun or fluttering in the dusty wind. Usually there are pictures or papers with writing, too small to read, and seemingly smeared by the weather. These expressions of loss, of grief and rage and pain are a memorial to some, to others perhaps a warning; something terrible happened here. It could happen to you, or it could happen here again. A wail in styrofoam and crinkled note paper in an otherwise silent landscape, a tragedy that 20 years ago in our culture would have gone unmarked, grief invisible to passersby.

But for some of us, certain landscapes will never be the same. Marked or unmarked they harbor the intensity of memory, the echoes or ghosts of misfortune, a reminder of something precious wrenched loose from loving hands.

I was in the crowd at the rally at a pet store on 6th Avenue, showing support for the woman who was raped there. Her fiancé spoke, and her council woman. There was a representative from RAAP and other community activists. Many in the crowd held up signs and most of us chanted back at the places where they paused for us, perhaps a little too predictably. There were a lot of rally veterans in the crowd.

I approached a local tv journalist and asked her how many other open rape cases are being investigated right now by the Denver Police Department, other than this high profile case. It occurred to me that there was probably somewhere in that crowd at least 1 woman who had been sexually assaulted who didn’t get a rally, or a call from her council woman, or flowers from a stranger, and I wondered how she felt. She nodded and smiled. I faded back into the crowd. It was a nice rally, and I’ve been to a few.

But what about those other rapes? What about the ones committed when we don’t have a national sports event in town, or those committed against the most vulnerable, the homeless or prostitutes, those committed in the poorer parts of town?

There have been serial rapists in Denver since before it became Denver, you can count on it. The same is true for every other city you’ve ever lived in. How many pieces of our urban landscape mark silently for some woman a site of unspeakable loss and rage?

Maybe we should mark those places like roadside accidents, memorials to our grief and rage. Women could set out markers, memorials wherever it had happened, however long ago. You remember where it happened, don’t you? Whether it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, even if it was a lifetime ago. You remember the apartment building, the office building, the alley the warehouse, don’t you? Maybe you pass it sometimes if you still live in the city, or when you come back to visit. Especially if you’ve moved on in your life, you don’t even mention it to your new friends. Only for you the landscape screams. Quietly.

Imagine. Suddenly the city would be peppered with them. Unburdened seeds of grief like painful peas beneath the mattresses of time would suddenly sprout, flowers of outrage blooming across our city, words finally finding form. “A woman was raped here 1979.” If you’ve never forgotten, would it be less painful to remember? Our truth would rise to the surface like secrets written in lemon juice becoming visible under heat.

Even namelessly our pain would be named, our losses honored, our truth told. We would see that we weren’t alone. In some places our silent screams may form a chorus, a deadly curve in the city where the lives of many women have spun out of control. It might be time for a guard rail here and there. It might be time for a different route.

I like this organic trend toward spontaneous personal expression, a move away from the organized, the controllable, the predictable. I think we should take it into our own hands, memorialize, honor our pain and warn others of treacherous stretches of the road.

Killing in a democracy

This is about the controversy over the military general who admits he enjoys killing people. I’m surprised that people are shocked about this.

I have shared grade school, college and work spaces with people who cared little for democratic tradition or the finer points of constitutional principles; people who feel that a fair trial is a waste of taxpayer money and that negotiation is “too good” for our hated enemies.

Some of my fellow citizens would have been just as comfortable being raised in a theocracy, giving up the freedoms of our democratic tradition as long as they were on the “side of right” and others were getting “the punishment they deserved.”

I am one of those who wish that, if capital punishment were not abolished, at least it would be applied with absolute fairness and dignity, not merely dignity for the condemned but dignity derived from a respect for the awesome nature of life itself and the solemnity of presuming to take it as a right of the state.

Capital punishment on a grand scale is the business of the military. Sure, it provides an education and you can work within it repairing trucks, filing reports or applying medical skill to the wounded, but at the heart of it the military exists to apply lethal force to our enemies. And while the military may recruit and attract people for many reasons, and we could say that nearly all of them serve with patriotic honor and provide at risk of their lives a service that ensures our own freedoms, I find it a form of neurotic disconnection for us to not admit the military provides an outlet for those who find great comfort in being handed the distinction between “us” and “them” and allowed to pursue lethal justice against “wrong doers” without the tedious bother of thoughtful self reflection nor the irritation of relinquishing swift judgment in favor of fairness.

I find it equally hard to believe the shock expressed in the media over the Abu Garib torture scandal. I felt that by the time we actually went to war against Iraq I could have walked into any bar in town and found 5 or 6 people more than willing to apply that same sadistic torture or worse to the “scum” who are our “enemies.” Why are we surprised that some of these citizens have found their way into military service?

I am one of those who longs to remind some of my fellow citizens that we are fighting for democracy, not just fighting “evil.” These freedoms that our “enemies” allegedly hate are enshrined in our constitution, the jewel of our government, of our citizenship, of our history as a nation. It is our constitution; not our flag, not current public opinion polls which shift like sands blown about by the winds of passion and manipulated by information campaigns; which defines the United States and which provides the foundation of our existence as a people, as a country.

The U.S. is not a team with team colors: red, white and blue; not a product with brand loyalty. We are something so much more amazing than that. We are a democracy founded on a constitution. This is the breathtaking achievement that we have modeled to the world.

...An a achievement whose apparently subtle glory is lost on some of my fellows in their rapture at the opportunity to “hunt down” and “punish” our “enemies.”

Why do I read that some people are surprised that our military includes generals who enjoy killing people and service people who take pleasure in disgracefully humiliating prisoners? Did you overlook these people in school? Did you not listen to the suggestions for the proper “punishment” of “evil doers” spewed out on talk radio and passed along at work?

It is beyond cynical to deny that citizenship and military service are shared by those with cruder notions of justice, even by those who think our highest goal is to protect the colors of the flag and not the content of the constitution.

And though I personally wonder what to do with these contradictions, I’m not the slightest bit surprised that they exist.