THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE
ESSAYS
GEORGE SAUNDERS
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
New York
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2007 by George Saunders
Some of these pieces have appeared, often in substantially different form, inGQ, theGuardian,McSweeney’s, theNew Yorker,Slate, on Amazon.com, in the anthologiesTake My Advice,Best American Travel Writing, andBest American Non-Required Reading, and as the introduction for the Modern Library paperback edition ofAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral; Cover art by Getty Images
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Saunders, George, 1958–The braindead megaphone / George Saunders.—1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1747-4
I. Title.
PS3569.A7897B73 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007006410
To my parents, on the occasion of their
fiftieth wedding anniversary, with gratitude
for their beautiful example.
CONTENTS
The Braindead Megaphone
The New Mecca
Thank You, Esther Forbes
A Survey of the Literature
Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra
A Brief Study of the British
Nostalgia
Ask the Optimist!
Proclamation
Woof: A Plea of Sorts
The Great Divider
Thought Experiment
The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s “The School”
The United States of Huck: Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Buddha Boy
Manifesto: A Press Release from PRKA
THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE
1.
I find myself thinking of a guy standing in a field in the year 1200 doing whatever it is people in 1200 did while standing in fields. I’m thinking about his mind, wondering what’s in it. What’s he talking about in that tape-loop in his head? Who’s he arguing with? From whom is he defending himself, to whom is he rationalizing his actions?
I’m wondering, in other words, if his mental experience of life is different in any essential way from mine.
What I have in common with this guy, I suspect, is that a lot of our mental dialogue is with people we know: our parents, wives, kids, neighbors.
Where I suspect we part ways is in the number and nature of the conversations we have with people we’ve never met.
He probably does some talking to his gods, his ancestors, mythological beings, historical figures. So do I. But there is a category of people I mentally converse with that he does not: people from far away, who’ve arrived in the mind, with various agendas, via high-tech sources.
I suspect that you also have these people in your mind; in fact, as you read this (sorry, sorry) I am become one of them.
Is this difference between us and Mr. or Ms. 1200 a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure. For now, let’s just acknowledge it as a difference; a change in what human beings are asking their minds to do on a daily basis.
2.
Imagine a party. The guests, from all walks of life, are not negligible. They’ve been around: they’ve lived, suffered, own businesses, have real areas of expertise. They’re talking about things that interest them, giving and taking subtle correction. Certain submerged concerns are coming to the surface and—surprise, pleasant surprise—being confirmed and seconded and assuaged by other people who’ve been feeling the same way.
Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate.
But he’s got that megaphone.
Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of Megaphone Guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing—but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying. As he changes topics, so do they. If he continually uses the phrase “at the end of the day,” they start using it too. If he weaves into his arguments the assumption that the west side of the room is preferable to the east, a slow westward drift will begin.
These responses are predicated not on his intelligence, his unique experience of the world, his powers of contemplation, or his ability with language, but on the volume and omnipresence of his narrating voice.
His main characteristic is his dominance. He crowds the other voices out. His rhetoric becomes the central rhetoric because of its unavoidability.
In time, Megaphone Guy will ruin the party. The guests will stop believing in their value as guests, and come to see their main role as reactors-to-the-Guy. They’ll stop doing what guests are supposed to do: keep the conversation going per their own interests and concerns. They’ll become passive, stop believing in the validity of their own impressions. They may not even notice they’ve started speaking in his diction, that their thoughts are being limned by his. What’s important to him will come to seem important to them.
We’ve said Megaphone Guy isn’t the smartest, or most articulate, or most experienced person at the party—but what if the situation is even worse than this?
Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favoring the conceptual-general (“We’re eating more cheese cubes—and loving it!”), the anxiety-or controversy-provoking (“Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?”), the gossipy (“Quickie rumored in south bathroom!”), and the trivial (“Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?”).
We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meanin
g, we discover what we think). This yammering guy has, by forcibly putting his restricted language into the heads of the guests, affected the quality and coloration of the thoughts going on in there.
He has, in effect, put an intelligence-ceiling on the party.
3.
A man sits in a room. Someone begins shouting through his window, informing him of conditions in the house next door. Our man’s mind inflects: that is, he begins imagining that house. What are the factors that might affect the quality of his imagining? That is, what factors affect his ability to imagine the next-door house as it actually is?
(1) The clarity of the language being used by the Informant (the less muddled, inarticulate, or jargon-filled, the better);
(2) The agenda of the Informant (no agenda preferable to agenda-rich);
(3) The time and care the Informant has spent constructing his narrative (i.e., the extent to which his account was revised and improved before being transmitted, with more time and care preferable to less);
(4) The time allowed for the communication (with more time preferable to less, on the assumption that more time grants the Informant a better opportunity to explain, explore, clarify, etc.).
So the best-case scenario for acquiring a truthful picture of that house next door might go something like this: Information arrives in the form of prose written and revised over a long period of time, in the interest of finding the truth, by a disinterested person with real-world experience in the subject area. The report can be as long, dense, nuanced, and complex as is necessary to portray the complexity of the situation.
The worst-case scenario might be: Information arrives in the form of prose written by a person with little or no firsthand experience in the subject area, who hasn’t had much time to revise what he’s written, working within narrow time constraints, in the service of an agenda that may be subtly or overtly distorting his ability to tell the truth.
Could we make this worst-case scenario even worse? Sure. Let it be understood that the Informant’s main job is to entertain and that, if he fails in this, he’s gone. Also, the man being informed? Make him too busy, ill-prepared, and distracted to properly assess what the Informant’s shouting at him.
Then propose invading the house next door.
Welcome to America, circa 2003.
4.
To my way of thinking, something latent in our news media became overt and catastrophic around the time of the O. J. Simpson trial. Because the premise of the crime’s national importance was obviously false, it had to be bolstered. A new style of presentation had to be invented. To wring thousands of hours of coverage from what could have been summarized in a couple of minutes every few weeks, a new rhetorical strategy was developed, or—let’s be generous—evolved.
If someone has to lecture ten hours a day on a piece of dog crap in a bowl, adjustments will need to be made. To say the ridiculous things that will need to be said to sustain the illusion that the dog-crap story is serious news (“Dog-crap expert Jesse Toville provides his assessment of the probable size of the dog and its psychological state at time-of-crappage!”), distortions of voice, face, and format will be required.
This erosion continued through the Monica Lewinsky scandal (“More at five about The Stain! Have you ever caused a Stain? Which color do you think would most effectively hide a Stain? See what our experts predicted you would say!”), and dozens of lesser (?) cases and scandals, all morbid, sensational, and blown out of proportion, often involving minor celebrities—and then came 9/11.
By this time our national discourse had been so degraded—our national language so dumbed-down—that we were sitting ducks. In that hour of fear and need, finding in our hands the set of crude, hyperbolic tools we’d been using to discuss O.J., et al., we began using them to decide whether to invade another country, and soon were in Bagdhad, led by Megaphone Guy, via “Countdown to Slapdown in the Desert!” and “Twilight for the Evil One: America Comes Calling!” Megaphone Guy, it seemed, had gone a little braindead. Or part of him had. What had gone dead was the curious part that should have been helping us decide about the morality and intelligence of invasion, that should have known that the war being discussed was a real war, that might actually happen, to real, currently living people. Where was our sense of agonized wondering, of real doubt? We got (to my memory) a lot of discussion of tactics (which route, which vehicles) and strategy (how would it “play on the Arab street”) but not much about the essential morality of invasion. (We did not hear, for example, “Well, Ted, as Gandhi once said, ‘What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?’”)
Am I oversimplifying here? Yes. Is all our media stupid? Far from it. Were intelligent, valuable things written about the rush to war (and about O.J. and Monica, and then Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson, et al.)? Of course.
But: Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn’t.
Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?
5.
Last night on the local news I watched a young reporter standing in front of our mall, obviously freezing his ass off. The essence of his report was, Malls Tend to Get Busier at Christmas! Then he reported the local implications of his investigation: (1) This Also True at Our Mall! (2) When Our Mall More Busy, More Cars Present in Parking Lot! (3) The More Cars, the Longer It Takes Shoppers to Park! and (shockingly): (4) Yet People Still Are Shopping, Due to, It Is Christmas!
It sounded like information, basically. He signed off crisply, nobody back at NewsCenter8 or wherever laughed at him. And across our fair city, people sat there and took it, and I believe that, generally, they weren’t laughing at him either. They, like us in our house, were used to it, and consented to the idea that some Informing had just occurred. Although what we had been told, we already knew, although it had been told in banal language, revved up with that strange TV-news emphasis (“cold WEATHer leads SOME motorISTS to drive less, CARrie!”), we took it, and, I would say, it did something to us: made us dumber and more accepting of slop.
Furthermore, I suspect, it subtly degraded our ability to make bold, meaningful sentences, or laugh at stupid, ill-considered ones. The next time we felt tempted to say something like, “Wow, at Christmas the malls sure do get busier due to more people shop at Christmas because at Christmas so many people go out to buy things at malls due to Christmas being a holiday on which gifts are given by some to others”—we might actually say it, this sentiment having been elevated by our having seen it all dressed-up on television, in its fancy faux-Informational clothing.
And next time we hear someone saying something like, “We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,” we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we’ll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive.
There is, in other words, a cost to dopey communication, even if that dopey communication is innocently intended.
And the cost of dopey communication is directly proportional to the omnipresence of the message.
6.
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act.
Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on
the distance between the idea and the world.
Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.
Megaphone Guy is a storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate—they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible.
Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is—no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny—the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.