My
favorite magazines are Star and Globe and I’m not going to hide
it anymore. With bright retail colors and big pictures of beautiful
people doing marvelous things, the tabloids are where I go for pure
graphic love. It’s good to revel in love like yellow flowers nestled
in a red meadow.
But the real gold of the tabloids is trut. Trut is the mutable concoction
of facts employed for an ulterior purpose. Trut consists of exactly
4/5 of the stuff of truth. Four out of five letters lined up as a reasonable
facsimile of truth.
Here at the end of the millennium, consumers of communications are adept
at trading in these fractional representations of the truth. Everyone
prepares particular versions of the truth for different people. We all
in turn take everyone else’s trut and calibrate it to our own
understandings. The missing H doesn’t bother us a bit. With 4/5
of the truth and some sense, people manage to get along.
The Rise of Trut
Imperfect truth is not new. White lies and misinformation have been
around as long as families and war. What is new is the widespread acceptance
of customized falsehood.
In 1974 when Nixon lost his job, the country fell under what I call
the tyranny of the smoking gun. After that, whenever there was a scandal,
the question was “What did he know and when did he know it?”
This red-handed attitude came with the rise of investigative journalism.
The problem is that this system plays right into the hands of those
in power. As long as they can hide the weapon, they can get away with
whatever they want, no matter how much of the evidence points to them.
Take the example of a guy named Ronald Reagan. He managed to stay unimpeached
by keeping one step removed from the smoking gun. He and his lackeys
committed some of the most heinous acts of cunning ever performed against
the United States Constitution. They cut a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini
to keep hold of the Tehran Embassy hostages until Reagan had beaten
poor Jimmy Carter. They financed a sickening war in Nicaragua by selling
crack cocaine to U.S. minorities. They took the traditional Washington
sport of white-collar robbery to obscene heights with the Savings &
Loan Scandal and the subsequent Resolution Trust Corporation bailout.
And on and on. He got away with everything, and we all know it.
What Trut Hath Wrought
This is not just an American phenomenon. Governments all over the world
are regularly shown to be run by corrupted phreaks who do everything
from rob us blind to fondle our children to kill us outright. Each of
these governments is invariably propped up by newspapers, TV, and other
media that proclaim that the Government is full of a bunch of good guys
looking out for us. Trut is the direct product of the chafing that occurs
when popular perception of reality doesn’t jibe with the dominant
version of reality. Instead of trying to prove the existence of an absent
gun, trut looks at the plainly visible and encourages logical conclusions.
The media often tries to ameliorate lost credibility with the use of
irony and satire. NBC gives us Saturday Night Live, where they make
fun of the power but “never go too far”, as George Bush
(#41) once said approvingly, standing next to Dana Carvey at a White
House press conference. Irony and satire are lazy and defeatist. Trut-making
is earnest and probing.
Trut can be a violent phenomenon. One of the most advanced cases of
a society trying to bring the dominant trut closer to the facts was
the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992. The citizens of LA knew that the
Rodney King verdict delivered in Simi Valley was severely flawed. There
was an overpoweringly widespread feeling that no amount of op/ed page
copy or letters to the editor could change. So they took to the streets
and let the world in on their trut: cops shouldn’t get away with
beating the shit out of people for no good reason.
The rebellion marked a turning point in the rise of trut. The Simi Valley
jurors had a smoking gun (amateur videotape) and still refused to convict
because they were holding on to their own trut. Their trut was that
the cops are good. And that African-Americans—- even pummeled,
prostate African-Americans surrounded by a dozen hyped up cops—-
are a threat. And the tyranny of the smoking gun went down in flames.
Back To The Tabloids
I’m not saying that tabloids are radical revolutionaries leading
the way to a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
But they are trailblazers in the methodology of trut. Instead of making
up constrictive rules for themselves that only impede their ability
to discover reality, they accept official dishonesty and embrace it.
Tabloids like Star and Globe are leading practitioners in a new standard
for honesty, and they don’t deserve to be held out with two fingers
like a stinky rag. The tabloids diligently seek out the 80% of the facts
that are discernible even when people like Reagan are doing their best
to hide the H on them. They make up the rest through careful analysis
of what they discovered. Then they present the result as if it were
Gospel.
The point is that this isn’t thin air. The quotes are completely
made up but they seem to represent something true. The quotes end up
being what the person would have said had they been honest and if they
had actually spoken to the reporter who wrote the story.
Trut is like people—- there are a lot of mean ones out there.
Tabloids use the underhanded method of vague attribution. Of course
whatever tabloids say a person said, only serves to buttress the trut
laid out in the article. It also tends to expose the position from which
a trut has sprung. A good example from the Globe article called “X-Files
Gillian Anderson Red-Hot Lover—- at 15.” The article profiles
Ralph Wallace, a former boyfriend of the actress. They wrap up the story
this way: "but he says he’ll always have a warm spot for
Gillian and loves watching her as Agent Dana Scully on the X-Files.”
He never said that. I know Ralph Wallace. Ralph Wallace is a friend
of mine. Ralph Wallace has produced a number of my verse dramas here
in Chicago. Ralph Wallace does not like the X-Files that much. Globe
only said he said that because it serves the article’s trut, which
is that Gillian Anderson has a nutty-goofy background, and she’s
really-really a nutty wild girl, and that is just one more reason why
everyone in the world should watch her show on Fox Network. This is
the trut according to Gillian Anderson’s agent & Rupert Murdoch,
and that warm spot is going to be in their jeans when they read the
overnight Nielsens. Trut everywhere.
Suckers
Probably the
biggest news broken by the tabloids lately is a story the Star reported
last August about presidential strategist Dick Morris. Here’s
the lead from Richard Gooding’s article called Top Clinton Aide
and the Sexy Call Girl: “President Clinton’s top political
adviser has hired a call girl almost weekly for a year and after kinky
sex has revealed the innermost secrets of the White House. While the
illicit pair sprawl naked, the trusted aide takes frequent phone calls
from the Oval Office and even holds the phone up to the call girl’s
ear so she can eavesdrop on the president’s conversations—without
Clinton ever knowing it.
“’He gets a kick out of me listening in’, Washington
call girl Sherry Rowlands tells Star in an exclusive interview.”
So we’ve got a short married guy with a foot fetish next to a
prostitute on one line and on the other line we’ve got the President
of the United States next to the guy holding the freakin’ nuclear
launch codes in a black suitcase. Now that’s a story.
First they lay out the bona fides of Ms. Rowlands: “She gave up
a shot at modeling and acting to get married at 19, and had several
children. But after 14 years the marriage broke up. Two years ago, she
signed on with an escort service for the first time, aiming to make
enough money to start a business cleaning homes and offices.”
So Star is broadcasting the fact up front that they are telling the
story from the "trut" of Ms. Rowlands. After all, this is
a popular magazine—- there are a lot more aspiring model/actresses,
young mothers, divorcees, call girls, entrepreneurs, and cleaning ladies
reading Star than there are Presidents of the United States. I think
they hit a good part of their demographic right there.
Star also takes the time to lay out their own legitimacy. They run a
profile on the “Star Reporter Who Investigated the Scandal.”
He used to be a copy boy at the New York Times.
The amazing thing about this trut is how quickly its radical core of
facts was absorbed into the dominant media. Network pundits and political
strategists folded the story into the overwhelming tableau of hours
and hours of uncut content provided by the President, his operatives,
and the cozy TV execs whose hopes and dreams are all wrapped up in keeping
the Executive Branch up and moving well, keeping the wars won.
The sad thing about trut is how it de-moralizes culture and boils down
world visions to a cold calculus of individual loss and gain. It doesn’t
really matter who plays footsie with whom or who’s carrying out
genocide on whom or who stole the elections. As long as the Fed keeps
interest rates low, or as long as the baby sleeps through the night,
or as long as the stock market keeps rising, or as long as the cops
don’t come for them, people will keep their mouths shut and go
along with whatever’s handed down. And we can bundle up ourselves
in tailor-fit coats of trut and steel ourselves against whatever comes
next.
© 2003 Daniel X. O'Neil
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