Following several months of disoriented and dispirited unemployment, interspersed with a brief stint frying fast food and another driving a bulldozer, I got a straight hair cut, put on a borrowed tie, and attended an interview for a job rewriting lines from wire copy that spewed out of a machine called a tele-printer, in a long ribbon, like a gigantic roll of toilet paper, for a handsome man with grey hair at his temples to read while gazing with a look of convincing sincerity into the two-way mirror of a teleprompter.
The first question in the interview was whether or not I’d gone to journalism school. After I’d replied in the negative, it was announced that the interview might proceed. That consisted of me agreeing that communism was bad, and identifying the prime minister, the finance minister and the foreign minister in various framed photographs that were hanging around the leathery office, in each picture either shaking hands or playing golf with my interviewer, each thoughtfully signed with a flourish and a dedication. I was given the job at a decent wage and never looked back.
I rose rapidly through the ranks, only partly by dint of hard work, but mostly carried along by the massively explosive expansion of the media industries, which had just made the leap from individual transistors to integrated circuits, lead by and paid for by advertising, which had been vested with the task of conjuring desire in a culture that could only be sustained by an intensity of consumerism sufficient to keep the factories running. For a time, one of my responsibilities was to check the nightly newscast before it went to air and pull the airline commercial if there had been a plane crash.
But I wasn’t a copy jockey for very long. I became a war correspondent by accident. When a senior colleague disappeared under that vengeful naval shelling of the Chouf, after that horrendously unexpected truck bomb at the airport in Beirut
It was largely bars and taverns. I found myself hanging around with a pack of people with money to spend at the Cita Bar in the Intercontinental in Managua, with the dusty field littered with discarded plastic bags out front; out by the pool at the Camino Real in San Salvador, only a short cab ride from where the death squads dumped their mutilated victims in a ravine for the dogs and vultures and journalists; the Miami Airport Hilton, with its bar full of crazed right-wingers and cocaine dealers in sunglasses, between flights at five o’clock in the morning; and that low, grey State Department building in Washington, not a bar at all, but just like all those other places, full of drunks and geeks and spooks in suits, and absolutely everything was off the record.
Here was the ticket. The hotels were booked. My passport and a few changes of clothes were always in a bag by the door. My phone would ring in the night. An editor would reel off about the troubles in some far away and godforsaken place. I’d be on a empty plane going in, while everyone there with any common sense, a visa, and the means to relocate, was scrambling to get out, queuing in frustrating long lines of uncertain-looking women and wailing children who hadn’t had enough sleep, and hastily packed baggage at the airport check-in, the men, having had no time to shave, sporting grey and worried faces of day-old stubble, emotional, afraid to talk lest they break down, less anxious to describe the future, mouthing words they had heard rather than thought about.
This was long before Rwanda Afghanistan
Soon I’d be transformed into a pundit with something to say about a place that had sunk into chaos and about which I was able to pass myself off as among the best informed, despite the fact that in the beginning I repeatedly mistook sadism for authority and hysteria for energy.
And as a pundit, I was free to discard those formalities of form that had served to define journalism as a profession, degrading it to the level of cheap popular literature. My photographs expressed emotions and sought to capture “critical moments”, not information. The high-contrast wrinkles around the streaming eyes of the suddenly grief-stricken made editors happy. If only I could capture the moment of death, I’d make the cover of Newsweek.
Indeed, I was even able to dispense with the very ideal of impartiality.
The Kurds are a hardy warrior race, their leaders invariably chieftains.
Rather than beginning my stories with the traditional “lead” to summarize the facts about who, what, when, where, why and how, my first paragraphs began with scenes that might have been drawn from pulp novels.
The Kalashnikov rifle, may I remind you, was Soviet-made.
Then I’d quote the predictable comments of someone I pretended had been chosen at random to typify the situation. A string of experts expressed opinions before important points were disclosed.
Tanks never move across international borders, they roll.
And I’d conclude with a wry observation that always implied the innate superiority of my culture and my context over the misery that had befallen whatever set of the deprived and denied that I happened to be writing about.
My news items were suspense stories with didactic messages, crafted to entertain, to sell to editors, and for which I invaded privacies and claimed immunities in the name of a greater good, the public right to know. And although I projected a profound and weary cynicism, I wasn’t cynical at all. That was just part of the package. I even had epaulets on my shirts. I shudder at the thought.
