You can’t have a dope business without dopers.”
— Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
Proposed laws about paparazzi are worse-than-useless. There are already laws on stalking, creating a public nuisance and any number of other categories that would apply and hold up in court against photographers (meaning anyone with a cell phone) who prey on celebrities or victims.
So any such proposal clogs up the legal system.
Second, they cannot work. There is a market for photos of celebrities and disasters. And it’s not new, despite the rhetoric of broadcast correspondents. Fan magazines have been around for most of the last century. Is it worse now? Sure, if badmouthing the present makes you feel better, why not. The public demands explanations, ideally in the form of a story. A popular story is that we’re going in a handbasket, that the olden days were better. It’s a story that allows us peace, an unsettling peace but anything must be better than either random coincidence or that human nature stays the same.
Everything is more-so, everything. There are any number of reasons for such tabloidism. One might be the growing alienation in this country. Some people live their years in or close to their hometowns, but most Americans move then move again. You don’t get to know your neighbors, work mates and fellow congregants well enough to gossip about them to other neighbors, colleagues and pew sharers. We just might have some innate need for gossip, and movie stars and victims of disasters one or three states over fit that bill.
A need for gossip sounds low. It is. It is a version of humanity’s need for story. But if the needs for food, warmth and procreation have the capacity to cause great harm, then the need for story means anyone who took just a split-second for a waiting-room magazine article on Prince Diana created the marketplace demand that eventually chased her limo into an embankment.
There’s a Brick from a couple of years ago where I argue that we need essays as well as stories. Now, that seems maybe an excuse for my not being Chabon, King, Cormac etc., but maybe that’s putting myself down unnecessarily. All of us from the time we begin talking put stories together, and that puts me somewhere in the middle in terms of skills and success of keeping someone’s attention.
Sometimes the most pragmatic people will praise medical advice from snake oil to the various biles. That’s the need for story. Solid scientific medical discoveries lack narrative. When there’s only so much doctors can do for some illnesses, people often prefer taking a chance on something unproven, even disproven, because it comes both with a complete explanation and anecdotal proofs — the key being anecdotes i.e. stories.
Yet in science, evolution continues because it is a very good story. It puts otherwise unexplained phenomena together very well, from “Once upon a time” to “ever after.” The biblical creation saga is a bestseller in the same way: it also puts together disparate elements that have to go together to make sense of the world today. If we all could agree to that the former represents physical reality and the latter spiritual truth … well that would be a fantasy, i.e. story, wouldn’t it? -30-
One reply on “We Ran Her Off the Road”
This was posted after finishing the book “No Country for Old Men,” which for a few hours made the world seem hopeless. The film adaptation — I just caught a matinee — made the author’s essentially identical lines and plot appear that evil is just about the same. OK, slaughterhouse technology has improved … since Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” — a strained Oscar in-joke if one checks out Sinclair’s “Oil” or its movie “There Will Be Blood.”