I am an occasional contributor to the Harper’s Weekly Review, Harper’s Magazine’s online newsletter. The idea for the Weekly is that by aping the language of conventional reporting, in the hope of calling some attention to the hypocrisy of how reporting gets done (distorted third-hand news), the linguistic obfuscations involved (was Obama really “considering his options” in Afghanistan? I think not.), the silly redundancies of weird science (macaque study, anyone?), and if there’s any time left over, to report on the week’s events.
Here’s an example from this week’s installment, which was written by my brilliant colleague, Paul Ford, who should be famous (and kinda is):
Utah state senator and gay marriage opponent Chris Buttars said he would support some housing rights for gays but that he did not approve of gay and lesbian activism. “I don’t want them stuffing it down my throat all the time,” he said. “Certainly not in my kid’s face.” Martin Amis promised that his new novel would anger feminists, and the English town of Cockermouth was recovering from huge floods. A study found that 13 million American women go online each month to watch porn. A Nigerian man killed his two-year-old son for being an evil wizard, and was caught carrying the child’s corpse in a woven plastic “Ghana must go” bag; a wallaby brutalized a two-year-old girl in Australia.
Not exactly the news, right? But it’s all real, all reported, just distorted for humor, and to mess with the reader’s mind. I love the form and have been writing it since 2005.
One of the key ideas of the Weekly is to be as offensive as possible to as many people as possible, using the language of journalism as cover. There are no standards. We want the reader to be angry (at least I do).
And yet, once I had a baby, I did identify my personal red line: bad things happening to children. Prior to becoming a father, I had no trouble making this juxtaposition: “A sixty-year-old man was accused of biting a six-year-old boy’s genitals after the child refused to stop touching himself and an English woman capable of climaxing forty times per day was convicted of benefit fraud.”
Haha!
Once I had a kid, though, I found my capacity to even remotely picture in my mind a bad thing happening to any child anywhere was gone. Sad child on television? Change the channel. Starving kid in the paper? Read the sports section.
I make no pretense that is a good thing to do. It’s clearly sticking your head in the sand. Bad things happen to children, and the world should know about it. But making light of it to comment on reporting jargon didn’t work for me any more. At the same time, it always bothered me that I had become so unforgivably soft.
Not that I hold others to this high standard, mind you. Thus, hats off to Paul for penning what may be the most offensive and disturbing line in Weekly Review history:
A Detroit-area man, on learning that his 15-year-old son molested his three-year-old daughter, stripped the boy naked and took him outside; there, the boy fell to his knees, yelling “No, Daddy! No!” before his father shot him in the head.
Congratulations, Mr. Ford. You made me cry.