August 1998 smoking jacket by Steve Gilliard |
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Someone Has to Say It
Moral cowardice has become an American art form.
People have devised all kinds of ways to not say shit that needs to be
said.
Take these kids who have started shooting up schools. In the news, you
see these whimpering, cowed victims. They always talk about how nice
the dead was and how the shooters were a little off. Just like the
media wants to hear. Not once is an alternate idea broached: school sucks.
How many people felt, at one point, like going into their classroom and
lighting up a few people? More than one? I bet so.
If that's not the case, Bill Gates would be a lawyer. Why else
create Geek World? Not to get laid.
Microsoft is not about money, Gates was not poor to begin with. It
was a gigantic fuck you to everyone who was mean to him in
school. Gates wasn't a knife and gun club type, but if he was, he'd
be bookkeeper for the Aryan Brotherhood in Walla Walla right now.
Now, he runs the world. All those jocks work for him.
Not everyone is Bill Gates. Some of us are Kip Kinkel and we resolve
our problems with a gun. The fact is that school doesn't work for
a whole lot of people. Some drop out, some become billionaires, but
some decide to cash in their chips and go postal.
You'll never hear that over the whining and bleating of the
local news. What are they going to say, two assholes dead and a nice
kid shot by accident?
In a recent Maureen Dowd column, she's whines about how no one likes
investigative journalists and how they tolerate a "Louisiana-style"
president.
Well, Mo, here's a news flash, the only people more hated
than reporters are politicians. No child or adult thinks one is
more honest than the other. Your average crack dealer gets more
respect than your average Congressman, and pimps, hell, they're
princes compared to your local newscaster.
The reason people don't hate Clinton, but wouldn't piss on Ken Starr
if he was on fire, is simple. Bill Clinton is a politician and is
expected to be less than honest. As long as they can't prove it, no
one cares. Ken Starr is like having the KGB in your sex life. While
everyone would like Clinton to be a faithful husband, the fact that
he isn't, just like the guy in the next cubicle, is not much of a
shock. It may be in the Beltway, but decent local government would be
a shock there too.
Let's be candid, if someone was offering free blowjobs, how many
people, married or not, would say no? When nailed for taking one
too many noontime siestas with the office suckoff queen, who wouldn't
lie? I, for one, would lie like a white trash jail bait hunter on
Springer. I'd lie like a politician in a debate. I'd lie like...Bill
Clinton.
Another amazing sight was watching troll extrodinare Matt Drudge
expound on journalism, at the National Press Club. I know more about
neurosurgery than Drudge knows about reporting. There is no solid reason for
Drudge, a half wit with an e-mail address and a web page, speaking before
the National Press Club. What he does is not Journalism, of any kind.
(editor's note: what we do is not really journalism of any kind either.)
He managed to embarrass himself, but that's not the point. No one there
thought to throw him out on his very large ears. Matt
Drudge at a meeting of journalists is like having a pimp run a
seminar on abused runaway teens. The attendees, journalists who actually work as
reporters, (you know with facts and whatnot) should have been offended at
the little cretin's presence.
Imagine if someone had had the balls to walk up to Drudge and say,
"John Peter Zenger? What the fuck are you talking about. Get the fuck
out of here, you half-wit." And then dragged his sorry butt out of the
building like an errant homeless man reeking of urine.
Readers pretend he's doing something useful, mainly because most of them
are lazy time servers. Real journalists, like Ray Bonner and David
Halberstam and Peter Arnett, people who have actually lost jobs for
telling the truth, have less in common with Drudge than humans do
with Madagascan sloths.
In most cases, this is an irritant. Like a pebble in your
shoe, or a pimple on your ass. We all ignore the crude and vulgar and
pretend everyone is really a good guy until they prove otherwise. Just
because his presence cheapens your profession and your work, that's no
reason to shove him aside like garbage.
In a culture where argument is deemed bad and unpleasantries best
left unsaid, our growing moral cowardice has consequences. People now
don't know if the Holocaust bad. No one has taught them that murdering
11 million people is simply wrong. That is is evil beyond words or
redemption.
I say fuck that. I say we need a bit of rudeness and a little honesty.
If someone is a charlatan, like Drudge, or full of themselves, like
Dowd, say so. Pretending that schools are fine and its just a few
crazy kids means we'll read about some other school gone postal.
Honesty may be overrated in many cases, but to keep spouting bullshit
we all know isn't true is, well, moral cowardice.
Jesus, if the truth of America, 1998 is that bad, maybe we should
all take to the hills and inbreed. Beats lying as our national
pastime, even if the kids look a little funny.
Steve Gilliard is a Manhattan journalist who tries to tell the truth. He is even more surly than Jack, who returns next month.
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