Joanna
Doug Henwood wrote:
> <http://nypress.com/18/10/news&columns/taibbi.cfm>
>
> KEEP POPE ALIVE
> By Matt Taibbi
>
> What a week.
>
> Late last week I was in Santa Maria, California, covering the Michael
> Jackson trial for a magazine, when I got an email from Press editor
> Jeff Koyen:
>
> The shit has hit the fan. Going on NY1 tonight to respond to
> Congressman Weiner's press release, wherein he urges people to throw
> our paper out.
>
> Nice.
>
> My first thought was-Why? I'd been on the road, hadn't had a chance to
> look at the new issue online, so I could only imagine. But clearly it
> must have been something terrible, if a goddamn congressman was making
> noise about it in public.
>
> I called Jeff. We exchanged pleasantries. He had just come back from
> the NY1 interview. I asked him about his pet fish, his vacation plans.
> It was about four minutes into the phone call before I realized the
> fuss was over my column, the one about the pope, which I had written
> in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze the previous Saturday morning.
>
> "You're kidding," I said, laughing.
>
> "No, I'm definitely not kidding," he said. He wasn't laughing. "It was
> linked on Matt Drudge this morning-something about it being an
> outrage. Chuck Schumer said something about how it was the most
> appalling thing he'd seen in 30 years."
>
> "That's hilarious!" I said, still not getting it.
>
> "Yeah, well," Jeff said. "Congressman Weiner has issued a press
> release calling for New Yorkers to throw our paper in the trash."
>
> "Outstanding," I said. "That's illegal, isn't it?"
>
> It was about two full days before I realized that no one back in the
> Press offices was laughing. I didn't take it seriously at first,
> because the scale of the whole thing seemed so completely
> unbelievable. For an off-the-cuff burlesque of Truly Tasteless Jokes,
> designed mainly to give readers a light break between what had lately
> been a long run of fulminating political essays in my column space,
> the paper found itself denounced by Hillary Clinton, Mike Bloomberg,
> Abe Foxman and pilloried on talk radio stations all across the
> country. Then, thanks to Matt Drudge, the Press was made into an
> exploding blog villain across cyberspace practically overnight.
>
> Friends and acquaintances in the south and in the west and everyplace
> else called to tell me that the Press, and I myself, were being
> skewered at that very moment In Their Neighborhood. In Dallas someone
> apparently called for me to be burned at the stake, while in an
> unfortunate development some hot-blooded Baltimore radio show alerted
> my already-estranged Irish Catholic relatives to my misdeeds.
>
> The hate mail was a flood by Friday. A polite schoolteacher in Ottawa
> gently implored me to shoot myself. Another writer, who left his note
> unsigned, wrote simply: "Burn In Hell You Fucking Dog." The typical
> Christian response usually involved some combination of the phrases 1)
> "I believe in the first Amendment as much as the next guy, but..." and
> 2) "You will pay in the next world" and 3) "For all that, the Pope
> forgives you." The order of the punishment and the forgiveness varied,
> but they were usually both in there, side by mutually reinforcing side.
>
> Meanwhile, back in New York, the Press website was so overloaded with
> traffic that it was effectively shut down for almost a week. The
> paper's offices were flooded with media interview requests and
> advertiser complaints, and there was turmoil and indecision within the
> office ranks, ultimately leading-as Press readers have probably heard
> already-to the resignation of my good friend Jeff Koyen, the
> editor-in-chief.
>
> Much of the mail I received seethingly anticipated that either I or
> the editors of the Press would turn around this week and try to cast
> ourselves as free speech martyrs, once we were a) fired or b)
> boycotted or c) both. I'm going to have to disappoint here. Nothing so
> noble as a real freedom-of-speech conflict actually took place in this
> case. The only accurate metaphor to describe what happened to the
> paper last week was stepping in shit. The shit was there, and we
> stepped in it of our own volition. It was a joint effort, between us
> and the shit.
>
> Look, we're all educated people. Even Anthony Weiner has a B.A. from
> SUNY-Plattsburgh. And as educated people we all realize that the "The
> 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope" had almost
> nothing to do with the pope or Catholics whatsoever, and certainly
> wasn't hate speech.
>
> If there was hate in the piece, it was not for the pope. It was for
> the agonizing marathon of mechanized media grief and adulation we so
> inevitably go through after the passing of each and every hallowed
> leader or celebrity. It was for the transparently fake unity of
> Democratic and Republican senators alike holding hands, hanging their
> heads, and-live on Fox and MSNBC-shedding a tear as good soldiers fold
> the flag at the passing of the great man, Ronald Reagan.
>
> It's not only funerals, but memorial services and various other pagan
> rituals; we are all supposed to weep on the anniversary of 9/11, and
> defer publicly to soldiers, and cheer for whichever bland milquetoast
> cine-blob wins Best Picture.
>
> But some of us don't want to cheer for the little girl who gets pulled
> out of the well, or get misty-eyed before the leader's casket. In
> fact, some of us get physically ill, and angry, during each and every
> one of these orgies of rote media emotion.
>
> "The 52 Funniest Things About the Death of the Pope" was way over the
> top, but it was commensurate-to the 197 consecutive fucking hours of
> Pope funeral coverage on cable we all know is coming very soon, with
> every politician on earth with a nose for Catholic votes lining up for
> a chance to blow into his hanky at the podium. We saw a preview of
> that last week; doubtless the Bloomberg, Clinton, Schumer and Weiner
> press releases at the pope's actual death will be of about the same
> length, and sent with the same alacrity to the same newspapers, as the
> ones released at his joke-death last week.
>
> This, incidentally, is what the alternative media is supposed to be
> for. While all across the major media landscape every public
> figure-every politician and every NBA star and every superficially
> grief-stricken plastic anchorman-will be "deeply saddened" and hanging
> his head during the obligatory moment of silence, there has to be
> someplace where the individual psychopath-loser, i.e. me, can say "I
> don't care." And not necessarily because it's right or wrong to think
> that way, but because a mandatory opinion held by everybody is no
> opinion at all. If we can't joke about the pope, then the pope, quite
> frankly, is not very serious.
>
> One more thing about what happened with us last week. In situations
> like this, when someone says or does something that outrages not just
> the left or the right but everyone, we have this habit of jumping on
> the offender with both feet and demanding an apology. Whether it's
> Ward Churchill with his "little Eichmanns," or that kid at UMass who
> called Pat Tillman a "pendejo," or Trent Lott, or Shaq squinting and
> talking about Yao in gibberish Chinese, we pile on until the guy
> squeaks. Apparently we respect a person more if he wilts under
> pressure and changes his opinions for the sake of convenience.
>
> It was crazy that that mechanism came into play here, and it would be
> even crazier for us to actually apologize. This was an extremely
> silly, trivial, stupid joke. If senators have time for this, they must
> not be busy enough.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
> .
>