Salon Columnists

I got a phone message the other night from a friend I recently wrote about, saying, "You know, a lot of us were really hurt by your article. It was really invasive and kind of cruel. I think you should take a look at some of the underlying hostility you may have. Everyone is asking me why you're such a bitch."

Underlying hostility, nothing! That's the thing about journalism, all of the hostility is melodramatically right on the surface, applied with all the rage of the speed-crazed, unobjective present in which it's all happening. It's the Hindenburg exploding live and the weeping reporter screaming, weirdly, "Oh, the humanity!" It's reporters hurling themselves into the vortex of moral outrage to take pictures of the twisted royal corpse.

It's raw, unrefined shock and opinion.

And it can really piss off your friends.

I'm in the doghouse again. I'm not so pathologically "artistic" that I feel no remorse when I hurt my friends with an unmuzzled jape. But ya know, I can't help myself. The Truth, however awful, has its own thrilling gravitational agenda, and is ultimately as impossible to thwart as a falling anvil. Humpty Dumpty may have been pushed by the paparazzi, but shit, look where it got him. He's a legend now. Before, he was just some fat, anonymous, grinning egg.

Richard Jewell would probably do it all over again, and so would Lewinsky, even if they wouldn't admit it to anybody, even themselves. Better to live in tacky infamy -- the grandchildren of both Jewell and Lewinsky will be delighted by the scandals, and will enjoy a giddy tan of importance when the flash-cube sun that scorched their ancestors moves into less direct points on the horizon.

Their future families will be sorry to see their names recede into dusk when those fickle attentions, over the arc of light years, slip into the Twilight Zone. But the beauty of it is, they can always cultivate their own disgrace, anytime they want to feel the burn again. The siren song of the piranha plays on an endless loop, an open invitation to all.
SALON | Feb. 10, 1998

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