Most people have a very limited range of real life experiences. Television and films and glossy magazine advertisements provide an enormous expansion of experience for the average person, by substituting artificial experiences for real experiences. On the television screen viewers experience artificial conflicts, artificial life. In advertisements they are given artificial ideals of beauty and fashion, artificial life-styles to which they can aspire. And in their newspapers and news magazines they are given a carefully filtered, a carefully slanted, view of what is happening in the world.
Dr William Pierce. America's Dissident Voices.
He had been unhappy for so long that when the opportunity came to change all that he didn't know what to do, how to recognise himself. All was changing. The profession which had once seemed so noble echoed in the corridors; flat, meaningless, the snakes in power. In the alcove opposite was the dero who's name no one had ever deciphered. One Christmas we asked him what he would like. He wanted a walkie talkie so he could talk to the ships off New Zealand, warn them of what was coming. Those days, when Fairfax was at its peak, was a different era. The Sydney Morning Herald had been a venerable, indeed revered institution. He looked out across the waves. There was only one ship on the horizon, far out.
It had been one of the proudest moments of his life, when, after his first front page story, the boss had reached across the news desk and said: congratulations, you've got the job. From all that chaos, the sadness that had coated his increasingly chaotic life, had come this wonderful achievement. It was possible. He didn't have to be beaten; they didn't have to look sorrowfully at him as some failed, drink ridden talent. Things didn't have to go wrong. He didn't have to die young. He didn't have to crawl out o the park in stench laden clothes, unwashed, the dirt of ages grimed into his skin. The sour stench. It didn't have to be that way.
All those glorious adventures; all that time when he had not known there was a different path, a different life, when each day grew more wild as he drank and he drank; sneering at anyone, the normals, who didn't drink like they did. Every moment was condensed into glory, sitting on a bar stool, smoking, in the days when you could smoke in bars, laughing, in the days when he still laughed. Another. And another. The tequila slammers. We laughed and we laughed, our teeth unbroken, our skin unlined. Indeed, despite the knock about he had given himself, he had always looked younger than he really was. Ungrown inside. All the normal forces, the aging forces, had slipped by; a ship making its way through troubled waters, intact, untouched.
He wasn't certain when the ecstasy plateaued and he began the slow decline. It had been a choatic path in itself, learning to drink normally, learning that there were ways to recover from the whack whack whack of the crystal light. That one handshake justified everything, all the battles with addiction, all the crazy adventures that had peopled his younger days. The upmarket apartments where he would spend a few days, pursued by queens. He didn't care. As long as he could drink. They'd pick me up, give me a shower, a blow job and $20 bucks and send me on my way, he'd say; and they tittered into their hands.
He was old now and nobody was paying for anything. He could barely stand to see what had happened to himself. What was once so outrageous, so much fun, such a grand adventure, had become a tired little routine. He wasn't comfortable about the way he was treated; but all up, it was better than the alternatives. He looked forward to a different life now; in the mountains or in the country, it wouldn't make a difference. He was determined everything would change. On the home track now. They could say what they liked, he would soon be free.
The ambitious little shits that had populated all those news rooms over all those years, the giant egos that bloomed as the Fairfax way, didn't matter any more. He had always thought, as he had said before, that history would rewrite the justices of the time. Instead history glossed over things that were no longer important; office politics that in retrospect were minute. If it wasn't written it wasn't written, it wasn't part of the record; and now, never would be. As time took his hand and his heart, as destiny mapped out a gentler path, he smiled, waved to the onlookers, shook the hands of his compatriots and disappeared. There was no point being angry about it all. The mountains would change all that. History, in a different, unexpected way, would change all that.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Some revealing passages from Scott McClellan's just-released book about his time in the Bush White House, "What Happened," as selected by Michael D. Shear:
On President Bush:
In the years to come, as I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, "I do not recall." ... Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment.
On openness:
The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine. His belief in secrecy and compartmentalization was activated when controversy began to stir. That secrecy ended up delaying but not preventing the consequences. Resistance to openness in times of controversy is ultimately self-defeating in the age of the internet, blogosphere, and today's heightened media scrutiny.
On the War:
In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness. Intoxicated by the influence and power of America, Bush believed that a successful transformation of Iraq could be the linchpin for realizing his dream of a free Middle East. But there was a problem here, which has become obvious to me only in retrospect...Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East.
...
Rather than open this Pandora's box, the administration chose a
different path -- not employing out-and-out deception but shading the
truth; downplaying the major reason for going to war and emphasizing a
lesser motivation that could arguably be dealt with in other ways
(such as intensified diplomatic pressure); trying to make the WMD
threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more
certain, a little less questionable, than they were; quietly ignoring
or disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and
minimising evidence that pointed in the opposite direction; using
innuendo and implication to encourage Americans to believe as fact
some things that were unclear and possibly false (such as the idea
that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program) and other things
that were overplayed or completely wrong (such as implying Saddam
might have an operational relationship with al Qaeda).
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1810019,00.html
Given the barrage of publicity and outrage that it has generated in the last day, you know what you're in for before you even crack the spine of What Happened, Scott McClellan's memoir of his nearly three years as George W. Bush's press secretary. It's not necessarily surprising that McClellan critiques his former co-workers. But the candor, anger and overall disappointment with which McClellan discusses President Bush and his policies is particularly surprising from someone previously presumed to be the most faithful of aides. On the fifth page of the preface McClellan bluntly writes, "History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder." That blunder, he continues, was one propagated by a "political propaganda machine" that misled the public on the reasons for war with Iraq.
http://www.slate.com/id/2192266/
Now he tells us. Scott McClellan's memoir offers more candor in a chapter than he let loose during his three years as the president's spokesman. Often kept in the dark by his boss and, at least in one case, deliberately sent out to mislead the public by his superiors, McClellan writes as if he went home after he left the White House in 2006 and purged. Disgorged onto the pages of What Happened, due out next week, are all of the emotions, regret, and doubt that apparently bottled up even as he eternally presented a sunny, largely unflappable demeanor while on the job selling the president's policies.
Because McClellan was such a team player, the book comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who covered the White House during his tenure. Yes, I knew he was angry at Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for using him to spread the falsehood that they had no role in the CIA leak case. That's in the book: "Top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." But the denunciation expands from there, and it's that breadth I never thought that his memoir would offer. McClellan outlines the "obfuscation, dissembling, and lack of intellectual honesty that helped take our country into the war in Iraq." He suggests the president and his aides were in permanent campaign mode, putting politics above principle, and chronicles how a "state of denial" led to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina. (He also includes a critique of the press, which he says acted as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda.")
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