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Foreword
I
began “writing” in my late 20’s
andearly 30’s,
when I was captivated by the books of Herman Hesse and Henry Miller. In law school in my early
30’s, instead of
studying and “cramming” for final exams, I was reading Fyodor
Dostoevsky.
Both
Dostoevsky and Hesse were
deceased when I discovered
them; but Henry Miller was still living, in Big Sur, California. I was curious; and I found
his address, and
wrote him a letter, enclosing a stamped postcard for his reply. “In Tropic of
Capricorn and Tropic
of Cancer and Sexus, Nexus
and Plexus,” I wrote, “I
was fascinated with your accounts of people who were obviously real,
and with
whom you were intimately acquainted.
Did
you use real names for them, or phony names?"
I received
his reply on my post card: “Phony
names!” was all it
said.
The accounts
in my present volume
all began with
“phony names”; but it has been 50 years, more and less, since I wrote
these; some of the peo;le now are deceased, and the rest, I have assumed, no longer
care. So I have
rewritten most of them
with real names.
The truth of
all matters (as it
were) came to me on
Northern Ireland’s "Bloody Sunday," January 30, 1972. Thirteen
civilians were killed by gunfire from British army troops at a
demonstration
in Londonderry.
I heard about
it on the car radio
somewhere between
Evansville and Vincennes, Indiana.
Kris
and Groad and Carol and Lizzie (real names) and I were on our way back
to
Chicago from a weekend at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.
We were
stoned out of our minds; so the report from Londonderry made a strange
kind of
sense to me, once I sorted it out.
The Irish
Republican Army was
blaming the British
soldiers for shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of demonstrators. But the British said their
shooting was
provoked by reports from IRA snipers’ guns.
When British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling
parroted the British army
version for Parliament, M.P. Bernadette
Devlin (whose speech at the Londonderry demonstration had been
forestalled by
the massacre) called him a liar. She
had
been there.
She and the other
protesters had seen the soldiers fire
indiscriminately, without reasonable
provocation. But
the soldiers, jittery
from previous riots and snipings, had a different idea of what was
reasonable. And in
Londonderry on January 30 they knew
that rocks were being thrown at them and that snipers were firing at
them. They
had been there, too. This, of course, is how wars
begin, and
are sustained. Each
side is so
convinced of the rightness of
its argument
that it will not concede the possibility that it is
wrong. There is
no hope of
reconciliation. One
does not compromise
when he knows he is absolutely right.
But both the
IRA and. the British
army could not be
right in laying the blame entirely on the other side.
The truth lay with one side or the other or,
more likely, somewhere in between.
It is
true that the IRA provoked the troops, who were understandably edgy
over
repeated sniper murders of soldiers dating back a year or more. But it is true also that
the Irish were
indignant – not self-righteously, but righteously –
over the occupation
of their country by foreigners. And
yet
the occupation was not wrong, given the majority of loyal subjects,
albeit
British but most of them born in Northern Ireland, not by their choice. Tracing the blame is
tracing through history,
most of it inaccessible, and all of it clouded by emotion.
The point
is,
at some level both
sides are wrong.
Their statements of blame are generalizations
and simplifications. Any
generalization or simplification is wrong when applied to a specific
case. Moreover, any
statement made anywhere,
anytime by anyone, is a
generalization or simplification.
There is not time enough to fully describe a
situation (it would take an eternity), let alone discuss it. Therefore, every statement
is wrong;
it can merely approach the truth.
Every statement ever made, anywhere, is a lie. Including this one. Since the foregoing
statement also is a lie,
there must be a true one. It
is this
one.
So this book
– even with
“real names” – is
one big lie. It is
composed of numerous little statements,
all of them lies. And
so the book may be
regarded as fiction, even though most of the events reported actually
happened,
to real people, most of whose real names are used, although a couple of
names
have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. All distortion is
intentional, partly for
amusement, partly to get at the truth, all to tell
the real story. With
this caveat, we’ll get on with the
stories.
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Some will ask, is it all
true? No, as I said in the foreword, none of it. It is all
lies. And this is why. It’s in the newspapers.
Take the February 11, 1972, issue of the Chicago Sun-Times, for
which I used to work. The Page 1 story, in the early editions,
was about a fatal gunfight in suburban Berwyn. Back on Page 34,
under a l˝-column, 18-point headline, “Sex counter at airport,” was
this vignette:
. JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH
AFRICA (AP) –
Heard on the public address
system of the Johannesburg
international airport:
“Will all female passengers
kindly proceed to the left-
hand gate, all males to the
right-hand gate and those
of you who are uncertain
please proceed to the infor-
mation counter for classification.”
Such signs of the times are often muscled out of later editions
by more “important” stories, which is why many readers prefer the early
editions. An especially fertile hunting ground is the sports
section of the Sunday Sun-Times, where, in early editions of November
7, 1971, appeared a three-column photograph of a grown man tapping his
front teeth with his index finger. Underneath was this caption:
A TOOTH-TAPPER
Football coaches release
their tensions in different
ways. Bob Spoo, of Loy-
ola Academy, for instance,
taps his teeth sometimes.
(Sun-Times photo by
Bob Langer)
Such “minor” Event reporting is not confined to the Sun- Times,
of course. These slices of life are scattered through-out every
metropolitan newspaper, like this report in the November 26, 1971,
issue of the Indianapolis Star:
ELEVATOR OPERATOR
REFUSES ON HAIRCUT
One of the 72 elevator operators in
the Senate Office Building in Wash-
ington who have been ordered to cut
their hair has refused, saying his hair
is shorter than Senator Edward Ken-
nedy’s.
Then, of course, there is the recurrent Event of cheesecake that
so offends the women getting themselves liberated. Not just Miss
America cheesecake, but the obligatory winter photograph of a beauty in
a bikini on a beach in Sydney (summer there), whose picture is in the
paper for no apparent reason other than that she is bikinied and
beauteous (and on the beach).
Those who smugly
deride the publication of this alleged trivia ought to deliberate a
little more before rendering judgment. Newspapers are in the
business of reporting Events, and major Events may go excusably
unrecognized as such until long after they happen.
For example, the first Southern student sit-in, at Greensboro, North
Carolina, on February 2, 1960, made only Page 22 of the February 3 New
York. Times. The play story:
FRENCH ASSEMBLY VOTES
DE GAULLE SPECIAL POWERS
seemed pretty important at the time, but the sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter proved to be the decade's major Event.
And to pick another time in the memory of many of us, the defeat
of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election was considered a
major Event. Subsequent history showed, however, that the
significant Event was not Goldwater’s defeat but Lyndon Johnson’s
victory.
And the invention of the electronic
digital computer in 1944 was probably the major Event of the century,
perhaps even of the last million years, since it may have been the
latest step in evolution. It was reported on page 17 of the New
York Times while World War II, which seemed significant at the time,
was on page 1. So what intelligent persons consider to be a waste of
space on trivia does not necessarily degrade these “minor” Events, such
as tooth-tapping.
An apple once fell on Sir Isaac
Newton’s head. That wasn’t in the papers at all; and if it had
been, people would have laughed. But it helped him formulate the
law of gravity.
Before criticizing a newspaper for
promulgating cheesecakery and other alleged trivia, one should consider
Marshall McLuban’s two major themes: The medium is the message;
the user is the content. If I might add a corollary, the message
may be the medium. That is, a newspaper can be defined by what it
prints. It is further defined by those who read it (the user is
the content), and, in turn, its total statement, from major Event to
trivia, is the true report on the society we live in.
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