The Shape of Days

It’s been the most bizarre night. I hit the ground running this morning with a lot I wanted to accomplish before the weekend. I planted myself here at my desk, turned off my e-mail and my phone, and worked and worked and worked. I stopped long enough to hoover some leftovers for lunch, then went right back at it. The sun set and I started to wind things down. I looked up at the clock, expecting to see that it was six thirty, maybe pushing seven.

It was five after ten.

I hate that feeling, man. I mean, I know I got some important things accomplished, but the fact remains that I sat here in this chair for fourteen hours straight. Even though I was doing stuff that needed doing, I feel like I just pissed away the day.

It’s got me in a foul mood.

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You know, somebody sent me a link today to a new site called “Truth Dig.” Clearly these guys are way behind the curve when it comes to building irrational exuberance around their brand. They should have called themselves “53Truth” or “7dig” or some other number-noun combo. I guess if they had, though, the conventional wisdom would have demanded that they feature a better-looking Web site. The one they’re running right now is just awful.

But superficial sniping aside, one passing glance at the site’s content conveys the inescapable impression that it’s all-agenda, all-the-time. What follows is a list of headlines or ledes from every piece of content featured “above the fold” on the site as of this writing. This isn’t a selective sample; this is the whole thing:

• Inventing Sin: Religion and Homosexuality
• “… the current wisdom about China as inevitable superpower and unstoppable economic force misses the whole truth.”
• An Atheist Manifesto
• The Big Blow-Up Over Venezuela
• Jesus: The Man, The Myth
• How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq
• The Plight of the L.A. Times
• Serious Miscalculations about Syria
• “It’s the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, not Iraq, that will unravel the Bush empire.”
• Who will rule after Bush’s ‘victory’?

My favorite of all:

• No single episode, not the torture pictures nor the Haliburton ripoffs, so perfectly captures the betrayal of the U.S. model of a free society as our military covertly buying the Iraqi press. The disgrace is compounded by dragging the Prophet Mohammed into this terminally deceitful enterprise.

Homosexuality is invented sin, Jesus was a myth, but Mohammed was a Prophet— please note the capital letter — whose name should not be sullied. Give me strength.

If I sat down and tried to come up with a site that would serve no other purpose at all but to piss off 55 percent of the American people and that would do that job spectacularly, I would have been unable to come up with anything even close to this good. Every headline, every sentence seems calculated to cause the greatest tendency toward apoplexy in its readers. Hell, even some of the bylines are inflammatory. The “Jesus: The Man, The Myth” item from the “Future Digs” section carries the byline of Madison Shockley, a minister of the United Church of Christ which gained some notoriety lately with its extensive marketing and public-relations campaign to attract new members from, to use the Reverend’s choice of words, “the gay, lesbian and transgender community.”

Look, I obviously have no problem whatsoever with opinion writing. I think every American with even a passing familiarity with the rules of grammar and spelling should have a blog. If you want to climb on the Internet and assert that Jesus was into guy-on-guy sex or that Hugo Chavez is a great statesman or that the United States is an oppressive theocracy that’s keeping you down, go right ahead! But to publish what are obviously opinion articles, and that furthermore are obviously intended to inflame and incite, under a big-ass banner that reads “TRUTH” … that’s just weird.

Repeat after me, okay? Opinions are not revealed truth. How some asshole happens to see the world is not how things really are. I swear, sometimes it seems like the world is full of Howard Beales, full of mad prophets of the airwaves, full of people who come in out of the rain wearing a trench coat over their pajamas and who sit down and start raving wildly about how the air’s not fit to breathe or how the industrialists oppress the workers or how microwave ovens give you cancer. And what’s worse, it seems like for every Howard Beale there are ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million dissatisfied and disaffected Americans who can’t wait to tune in and see what he’s gonna say this week.

Now more than ever, Americans need to be told to think for themselves. Because now more than ever, there are people out there whose sole preoccupation is to convince you to think what they want you to think and to believe what they want you to believe and to repeat the things that they tell you to say. And now more than ever, those people have access to a whole new medium of communication through which to deliver their message. And now more than ever, those people are savvy and clever and like to tell you the most unapologetically ridiculous things while standing behind a big podium that says “TRUTH.”

“Truth Dig” editor Rober Scheer was quoted recently on the Internet. “There is truth for any given subject,” he said. “But you have to dig for it.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is bullshit. It’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. That rain falls from the sky, that’s truth. That flowers bloom in the spring, that’s truth. That everything that’s born must someday die, that’s truth. Opinion articles aren’t truth. Making outrageous statements about the religion to which your audience subscribes while fawning over the one that opposes it isn’t truth. Declaring that Syria isn’t a rogue nation based on the observations of “a young scholar who has lived in Damascus” isn’t truth. Running a headline that says “U.S. Occupation is Worse Than Hussein” isn’t truth. It’s opinion. And worse, it’s misleading opinion, opinion that turns its back on observable facts while trying to justify an unjustifiable conclusion.

But worst of all, the very worst of all of it, is the fact that lies beneath. See, behind all the counterfactual headlines and the insulting ledes lies an assumption, publicly unspoken but self-evident, that the people who read “Truth Dig” are fools. There’s that assumption that the people who read “Truth Dig” will accept what they’re told, that they’ll believe what they read, that they will see the truth.

If somebody wants to stand up and voice an opinion, no matter how absurd, I’ll be the first one to cheer him on. But to embrace the idea that he’s in possession of The Truth and that everybody else will follow him to the promised land … that’s just nuts.

• I always feel like
• Dreamed of a girl
• Entire film shot in one take