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To a journalism teacher
I just found out from a card with a picture of a laughing old man in sunglasses that we lost my high school journalism teacher, Mr. Pease, to prostate cancer.
Bob Pease was a Missourian who wrote novels and plays, coached JV football, and relished assigning banned books to his English class. When he taught our class at Buena High School in suburban SoCal, he was in his 60s, sort of a cantankerous but wise Western Wilford Brimley character.
Back then we would print stories from a 286 PC, lay them out with hot wax rollers, then drive the stacked pages down the Santa Paula Freeway, past the orange groves and crumpled mountains of Ventura County, to a citrus farm town with its own newspaper and printing press, something you needed before the Internet to get word out. The press shut down years ago.
One day after beating a deadline to put an issue to bed, we came to class to find that Mr. Pease had left us with a congratulatory letter he had typed up, praising us for prevailing against the odds. The last line quoted from the headline over my longhaired drummer friend Matt’s review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “‘A Bloody Success,’ indeed.”
When you are 17 and have fresh memories of middle school P.E., with its mandatory jock strap inspections and other human rights abuses, it is hard to express what it means for someone like Mr. Pease to honor you. His class was the anti-P.E., where you were a trusted professional who could slip out for important editorial duties, though Mr. Pease may not have signed off on the time the three of us, during 6th Period, drove a car out of the school parking lot to pick up the new Porno For Pyros CD, for the music page, feeling like actual Spin critics. But the journey was undertaken in the spirit of loyalty to Mr. Pease and what he stood for, which was the freedom and dignity of the written truth.
Coverage in The Buena Vista slanted towards spring dances and water polo scores, but there was space for more. And with no Web, it was heady to be in the one class where a few had been vested with the power to disseminate unauthorized ideas.
As editors-in-chief, we took ourselves so seriously that I imagined that I was John Lennon to my co-editor Daniel’s Paul McCartney. As the 4.0 Most Likely To Succeed, Daniel could be Paul, the sunny counterpart. He could devote column inches to interviewing the student body president and promulgating teetotaler values (“People think drinking is cool. But what’s so cool about stumbling around like an idiot?”). And I, as John, could write columns accusing student government of being a Vichy sham. Mostly I just wanted a girlfriend. With patience and grace, Mr. Pease put up with all this.
The last time I saw him, in 1994, Mr. Pease was stooping over a stack of English papers, probably about Brave New World, as I walked in after my first semester of college. “Met any girls, John?” was the first thing he said.
The last time I talked to him it was about ten years later and you could still write articles in the craft Mr. Pease taught us, for money. I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., waiting to meet a guy who was going to give me a stack of FOIA’d documents about nuclear submarines for a magazine article, when the urge came to phone Mr. Pease and tell him what I was up to. Suddenly there was a familiar drawl on the other end of my cell phone, as if the Pease hotline would always be there. I remember he made a crack about U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. And he told me he was still messing around with penning a Western novel, which made me happy.
This year I drove to my hometown, coming in with the sun going down on the orange groves and crumpled mountains. It made me think of a moment at the brink of summer. It was 1992 and two high school nerds in a black Camry were on the road to the printing press, with the wax layout sheets in back. The death of print news makes that feel like it was a thousand years ago. Mr. Pease initiated us into an ancient order, and whatever that means in this weird new century, I will always be grateful.
P.S. I have archived Legacy.com’s guestbook of tributes to Bob Pease here.
The Science of Bad Ideas
The following is adapted from a piece I wrote for this book.
“Cognitive dissonance” is what the psychologist Dr. Leon Festinger called the horrible grinding noise of two conflicting ideas in your head. The term is making a comeback in the world of Internet comment boards, where flame warriors use it to describe what happens when, for example, Orly Taitz, the Orange County dentist who claims the president was born secretly in Kenya, perseveres in the face of overwhelming evidence, including an actual 1961 announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser.
How the “cognitive dissonance” thing got its start is sort of an amazing story, involving the mischievous university psychologist and his unwitting flying-saucer fanatic subject. The story begins on a depressing Christmas Eve in Chicago in 1954.
This was the night 44-year-old physician Dr. Charles Laughead stood outside a house in the western suburbs of Chicago, desperately watching the skies for his 6 p.m. ride, while he and his followers sang carols. Five years before Plan 9 From Outer Space, reporters were having a field day with the doctor and his series of failed predictions. But tonight was really going to be it. He planned to be on another planet at this time tomorrow. One headline read: SECT EXPECTS TO LEAVE EARTH TONIGHT.
They had staked everything on the prediction of the allegedly clairvoyant Ms. Dorothy Martin, 61. At 6 p.m. the creatures Laughead affectionately called “the boys upstairs” would land in space pods to evacuate Man from a flood that would turn Cook County into a seafloor. A crowd of reporters, spectators and hecklers gathered to take in the futility.
* * *
“I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead had said, preparing for one more attempt to leave Earth. “I’ve taken an awful beating in the last few months, just an awful beating.” Worst was he’d lost his job at the medical school. Alien rescue or not, his boss didn’t like that Laughead was stressing out students by claiming the U.S. was about to become an archipelago.
BELOW: Story from the Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1955–one of my favorite news heds.
Where the hell were the space pods? This wasn’t the first time the cosmos had left him swinging in the wind. Yet he persevered in a way that fascinated the Stanford psychologist Festinger. The psychologists got such a kick out of this that they planted a mole in his group to write down the details, laying the groundwork for Festinger’s landmark 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.
An earlier due date had come and gone already. The first time, some of the UFO people cried. Not Laughead. He got on the phone with reporters; he sent a press release to newspapers across the country, explaining opaquely: “Due to the confusion which has arisen from the prophecy, we have decided to unite forces to complete the prophecy.”
Because of press coverage, the phone was ringing off the hook with jokesters claiming to be the spacemen. One identified himself as Captain Video. Laughead’s daughter tried to tell him that Captain Video was the TV character who sewed a thunderbolt on his jumpsuit. But Laughead wanted to keep open the possibility it was a coded message. Everyone was so coiled up for first contact.
A second jokester phoned and invited everyone to his party across town. Mrs. Dorothy Martin, the matriarch of the UFO group, said this was it, this was the message.
“Put your coats on,” she said, and led a delegation across town, only to return, disappointed. The other humiliations had included a reporter’s cheap shot in the Chicago Tribune, observing that the Laughead kids must not think the flood was coming, seeing as how they’d set up ornaments in the living room for Christmas morning. And as the night grew long, other practicalities mounted: If the Earth wasn’t going to be doused, what was Dr. Laughead going to do about presents?
The phone rang and this exchange took place, transcribed by one of Festinger’s researchers:
REPORTER: Dr. Laughead, I wanted to talk to you with reference to this business about—you know—your calling the paper to say you were going to be picked up at six o’clock this evening. Ahh, I just wanted to find out exactly what happened…. Didn’t you say they sent a message that you should be packed and waiting at 6 P.M. Christmas Eve?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No.
REPORTER: No? I’m sorry, sir. Weren’t the spacemen supposed to pick you up at 6 P.M.?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, there was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and what not.
REPORTER: There was a spaceman in the crowd?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, it was a little hard to tell […]
REPORTER: […] Did you talk to him?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No, I didn’t talk to him.
REPORTER: Didn’t you say you were going to be picked up by the spacemen?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No.
REPORTER: Well, what were you waiting out in the street for, singing carols?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, we went out to sing Christmas carols.
REPORTER: Oh, you just went out to sing Christmas carols?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, and if anything happened, well, that’s all right, you know. We live from one minute to another.
REPORTER: […] Uh, well how do you account for the fact that they didn’t pick you up?
DR. LAUGHEAD: As I told one of the other news boys, I don’t think a spaceman would feel very welcome there in that crowd…
Dr. Dre Fan Fiction Dupes New York: Cliffs Notes On a Scandal
They tried not to let this book see daylight, and now I know why. I’ve just readLove & Consequences, the story of a white girl who lived the life you only hear about in Dr. Dre songs. This is the fake memoir that scandalized the New York Times last month, when hardened gang moll Margaret B. Jones was exposed, by her own sister, as middle-class liar Margaret Seltzer.
In her dust-jacket photo, she’s pale, with a hard stare. When the picture was taken, she was still speaking in a weird drawl, and claiming she couldn’t sleep without a gun under her pillow. But she’d invented it all at a Starbucks, tricking not only her publisher, but also her fans at the Times, which covered the bookrepeatedly.
The damage control was swift and successful. On March 5, with the book just out the door, the New York Times revealed the hoax, if not just how bad it was. Her agent, Faye Bender, told the paper, reassuringly, that “there was no reason to doubt her, ever.” And that set the tone for the coverage. Love & Consequences, wrote the L.A. Times, must have seemed “edgy, sexy, cinematic.”
Except it’s not. As a true story, this book would have been less about “love” and more about crude racial stereotypes. As a hoax, it reads as the laziest forgery ever to receive a six-figure advance and a rave review in the Times. This isn’t like those wickedly resourceful fakes, Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. Seltzer, in stark contrast to those guys, just sort of shows up with this dumb story.
In an important sense, the real scandal was never discovered. Thanks to the book’s speedy recall, we missed what should worry everyone: the catastrophic failure of the Times’s B.S. detectors, which we thought they repaired after that thing with Judith Miller and the WMDs.
Copies are so rare that they’re going for $78 online, but one has just slipped through the blockade. So here, for the first time, are the Cliffs Notes.
Chapter One: Lost
Year: Unknown. Margaret B. Jones watches her friend, “Kraziak,” bite the dust in a hail of AK-47 bullets. This is what we call in media res—opening mid-story.
In this passage, which the NYT excerpted, Seltzer places herself in a ghetto battlefield, straight out of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. “We were smoking niggas,” she concludes, after spilling a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor for the late Kraziak, “sending them to heaven every day.”
Tipping the 40: almost every under-35 hipster, stoner, goofy office guy, or frat boy on a liquor run has at one time trivialized important social problems byjoshing about this fabled street rite. Here this Caucasian joke is made flesh, as the amber liquid burns Jones’s throat. A “big homie smiled at me,” she recalls, “and then slipped the remaining cups over the neck of the Hennessey bottle…”
Easily the best part. From here on the writing goes downhill, and the story becomes less believable.
Chapter Two: The Hand You Are Dealt
Flash back to around 1979. Jones is an innocent toddler in foster care, who loves Make Way For Ducklings but is shell-shocked from dimly-described sexual abuse. The transition into G-life is hazy. Here she introduces a major theme, an excuse for the oddly psychologically flat tone of the book, its lack of introspection. Turns out she has PTSD, and is too stunned by life! “If I couldn’t feel it,” she writes, “it couldn’t hurt me.”
Chapter Three: Start From Scratch
1982. She ticks off L.A. highways as she describes a drive into the vicinity of Slauson Avenue, though it sounds inspired more by Mapquest than memory. Then, with the arrival of Margaret’s new caretaker, Big Mom, L&C detours fromN.W.A.’s Greatest Hits territory into the world of Aunt Jemima fantasies.
It doesn’t take an African-American Studies major to get bad vibes from the stereotypical treatment of the saintly mammy. Big Mom has no interests of her own; she wears an austere white dress on the book cover, calls everyone “child,” and will ask the Lord: “I know you don’t give me more than I can handle, but please, sweet Jesus, help me with these youngstas.”
Everyone else speaks in what Times critic Michiko Kakutani called “colorful, streetwise argot”: nigga this, you’ze a punk-ass that. Kakutani also called the book “humane and deeply affecting.”
On its own terms, this book isn’t even working as a memoir, in which someone thinks about their life. Instead it’s like a doll’s house of African-Americans, displayed for us in supposedly authentic glory.
One night Margaret has been having a cloying conversation with God, when gunshots wake her! Outside she sees a guy covered with blood. Not knowing why, she finds herself writing, in crayon, the words “South Central.” Poor, unsuspecting Margaret!
Chapter Four: Conceptions of Shade
1983. Margaret discusses skin color with adopted brother Terrell, in what is supposed to signal a dawning consciousness of race, as in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “Living here,” she observes, “white seemed to mean rich people who didn’t understand or care.” Another thing: Turns out black people don’t even want to be white!
A false note is struck as we see Taye, another kid, playing the old Atari Combat tank game, and yelling at the TV, “Bam, nigga, take that. Yea, nigga, what now?” First of all, Combat was paced like molasses. Second, this is a good place to mention that, aside from Combat, authentic ‘80s flavor is conspicuously AWOL from the setting and slang. It all feels very modern. Sure, some words have been around forever. But where’s “sucka”?
In a supposedly adorable moment of ethnic tourism, Margaret tries to use Terrell’s afro pick.
We end on a note of cheap fatalism that will define the rest of the book. What critics mistook for fresh pathos was a sentimentality stolen from airbrushed T-shirt art remembering the slain rapper 2Pac. “A nigga didn’t choose this, it chose me,” a voice echoes in Seltzer’s head. “It ain’t my fault the streets was kalling.”
Chapter Five: God’s Favorites
Terrell is committing crimes, applying to be a gangster. Seltzer presents this as a very methodical process, almost like applying for Advanced Placement tests. “Everyone had a rank…and everyone else knew what it was…Others had failed to prove themselves and were known as as ‘punks,’ ‘marks,’ and ‘bustas,’ unable to raise themselves above the ruins they had become…”
Loads of bad “street” dialect: “[G]o ask this nigga some shit…Easy kome up, feel me? […] So homie walk up to the nigga and ask him some bullish…that kinda shyt…[etc.]” (An author’s preface reproaches us lest we take offense: “Please do not confuse the use of slang and my replacing c’s with k’s as ignorance or stupidity.” OK.)
Taye confronts Big Mom: “Where exactly is ure God?…God is jus like everyone else. He jus don’t give a fukk.”
Just as Big Mom begins thrashing Taye for this deist rant, Seltzer lectures us in a high-school-paper tone on “the tradition of beating children in the black community.” She’s trying to cover her sociological bases, so she also takes us into the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the rock of the community. She describes it in an awkward aside that sounds like Wikipedia.
And you’re wondering, where are the moments that feel spontaneous, like life? All that time at church, and Seltzer will only say of it: “The pastor was well aware of the interconnectedness of the community’s people, and it was reflected in his sermon, which seemed to speak directly to me and the things going on in our family.”
Then, on the way out of church, everything turns into a Shaft movie for a second:
I walked beside Mother Evans, carrying her Bible…I smiled back, but then, before I could say anything, a man came around the corner of the building and grabbed Mother Evans by the arm.
‘Gimme the purse, ol’ lady.’ His head looked nervously from side to side. ‘And the diamond ring, too.’Mother Evans shook her head…She reached slowly toward her bag, but then, instead of taking the bag from her shoulder, she reached into her coat and pulled out a small pistol and turned back on the man.
‘Punk ass mothafukka,’ she said, pointing the pistol in his face. ‘Git up on outta here, you ain takin shyt. Punk mothafukka.’ The man looked shocked for a minute and then took off…
Mother Evans tucked the pistol back into her jacket and opened her door as if nothing had happened.
The Rest of the Book
Sad to say, it just gets worse. Instead of providing a believable arc by which snow-white Margaret Jones becomes an “Original Gangsta”—fanatically devoted to dealing drugs for the Bloods, but somehow able to leave it for college—the book disintegrates into a series of juvenile episodes.
Margaret Jones goes to McDonald’s…her friend makes life hard for caricatured Korean store owners (“You no touch, you no touch!”)…a guy named Rodney barricades himself against the LAPD (“This is your last chance to do this the easy way, Rodney”)…she visits a black prison inmate in the Central Valley of California, whose whole schtick seems ripped off from Public Enemy’s “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos,” being that he, like rapper Chuck D, resents a female corrections officer. Oh, and Margaret screams “Nooooo” as the cops kill her dog, Bitch, who then bubbles over with blood and twitches for two pornographic pages.
By the last chapter, “The Last Threads Of Innocence,” she will have overcome her blind hatred for the Crips—the reason she doesn’t use the letter C—and, to her surprise, fall in love with one. And she will have learned the code of the streets from a drug dealer, Slikk.
We can forgive Seltzer for falling short of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but when she recalls such advice to young Gs as “in war, strive for rendering the enemy harmless,” you wonder why gangsters would bother drawing up a code at all. That code also advises the G to strike with the force of a “vicious act of terrorism.” That line is also an uncredited swipe from the Wu-Tang Clan albumEnter the 36 Chambers, which wouldn’t have been released yet.
Slikk insists she attend college. But she protests: “I am L.A. I’m-a die in this bitch.” But when she gets in, she makes Big Mom so very happy…
Another chapter begins with an august day being “cooled” by a “touch of Santa Ana wind”—a dead giveaway to any Los Angeleno, though I can understand why a New Yorker would miss it. As we know out here, these “devil winds” are hot. They “make your nerves jump and your skin itch,” Raymond Chandler wrote, “and every booze party ends in a fight.” Now that’s what an L.A. underworld should sound like.
In the world of Internet fan fiction—in which amateur fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other shows imagine new adventures, they have a derisive term, the “Mary Sue Story,” for wish-fulfillment that crosses the line. That’s when a certain kind of fan breaks the rules and makes herself the hero, fascinating everyone, saving the world. This story, about a white girl who makes black people happy by escaping from their ghetto, is a Mary Sue story about race. And people ought to be upset that it passed for realism.
(Cross-posted with a worse headline at AlterNet)
EXCITING UPDATE: Fascinating new wrinkle in the scandal comes to us viaMediabistro. Turns out Seltzer had a past as a crucial weak link in the Earth Liberation Front, that crazy group from the Northwest that saved the world in 2001 by lighting an SUV dealership on fire.
Willamette Week did some fine detective work in tracking down her former colleagues at the group. One unnamed source describes how Seltzer dropped the ball as a leader in the committee to free arsonist Jeff Luers.
Her involvement basically consisted of manipulating people, lying, pitting people against each other, taking on more responsibility than she should have and then dropping the ball on everything completely. Fuck her.
Reminds me of the animal rights activists in Twelve Monkeys who, tied up by Bruce Willis in a pet shop, gripe that radical eco-terrorist Brad Pitt called them “ineffectual liberal jerkoffs.”
Spring Cleaning
Thanks to Australian public radio and host Rachael Kohn for having me on today to discuss Bad Moon Rising, my fun new book about the Moonies, the cult of the Capitol.
Best thing about being done with a book about conservative media? Clearing my main hard drive of 30 GB of research material, including all these pervy, mind-numbing documents from the world of Washington Times publisher Reverend Moon, with such filenames as “The Most Holy Place.ppt.”
Return of the Robot
A long time ago I wanted to design a whimsical computer RPG about being a rock star. Part of the game would have been that after assembling your band, surviving the streets, and buying studio time, you’d go to the 7-11 to read a fakeRolling Stone review of your album. Depending on your skills, it would be scathing or fawning. I never actually coded the game, but I did write the review-generator, which took on a life of its own. During the Dancing Baby Era of the Internet, it became a minor sensation.
Now I’ve upgraded it to Web 2.0. Let the venture capital commence!
’90s nostalgia is gonna be here in a big way
Around 2010, if all my calculations are right. Grunge, fractals, Lollapalooza, The Lawnmower Man. Anyway, my friend Andy Baio has an amazing educational video from the era: “Internet power!” It was designed to leave people staggering at the fact you can click on a picture of a T-Rex and download it to your modem. That is, if no one picks up the phone at the other end of the house.
“Kraziak had moved out of the hood…”
I just returned after over a week away from home to find a parcel waiting at my doorstep. When I opened it, I jumped for joy.
It’s one of the only available copies of Margaret B. Jones’s Love & Consequences, the gang memoir that was recalled from bookstores for being fake. I hope to blog the book, which tells the story of how Jones (in reality a middle-class Valley girl) lived a life worthy of Dr. Dre. It duped the New York publishing world.