by Jarett Kobek
Jayson Blair filed stories about domestic issues.
Like Judith Miller’s articles, the articles written by Jayson Blair were also intolerable bullshit.
Unlike Judith Miller, who asked Ahmed Chalabi to supply her with nonsense, Jayson Blair just made up his own crap.
He faked sources. He faked quotes. He faked being on location.
Eventually all of the bad reporting was exposed.
In the case of Blair, who wrote stupid little articles that were forgotten the day after publication, the New York Times printed an enormously long front-page article.
The article called the situation “a profound betrayal of trust” and a “low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.” The article contained a long digression as to whether or not Jayson Blair had been promoted due to his plethora of eumelanin.
In the case of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, whose articles were cited by George Bush II as evidence in the run-up to America’s invasion of Iraq and were thus responsible for 36,710 American casualties and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the New York Times published a short editorial that said its coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction was not “as rigorous as it should have been.”
Jayson Blair was fired and disappeared in disgrace. Judith Miller got a hefty severance package and continued to work in the news media. Michael Gordon stayed with the New York Times.
So this was the lesson, then, from America’s paper of record: if you’re going to publish intolerable bullshit, don’t make up lies.
Do what a good journalist does.
Go out and push your nose to the grindstone and wear down the soles of your shoes and find someone else’s lies and repeat those.
And don’t be Black. And don’t be a woman.
ANYWAY, THE REPORTING on Tartine was excellent. The croissants were called “flaky, buttery, crisp, greasy.”
This was true. This was right. The croissants of Tartine were indeed flaky, buttery, crisp and greasy.
So there’s always hope.
ADELINE AND ERIK WILLEMS were sitting in Tartine. They were having brunch. The night before, Adeline had screwed out Erik’s brains.
This proved to be a welcome distraction from the fact that she’d spent several days being excoriated on the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for feigning interest in professional wrestling, hacking corporate websites, and inspiring inchoate longing for the bassist of the Los Angeles band Warpaint.
Adeline was picking at a croissant and drinking coffee. Erik Willems was eating a ridiculous banana creme tart.
Adeline was staring into the blankness of Erik Willems’s eumelaninless face and wondering how it was that he fucked like a beast.
“There used to be a girl who worked here,” said Erik Willems, “Every startup guy in the city was obsessed with her. They were always talking about the Tartine Girl.”
“Did you ever lay eyes upon her, mon frère? Were you too smitten by her manifold charms?”
“I did,” said Erik. “I didn’t see the appeal. She was cute I guess, but I tend to prefer older women.”
Adeline looked out of the windows at 18th Street, which served as a direct line between Valencia Street and Dolores Park, extending all the way into the Castro. Tartine was between Valencia and the park, which meant that it was on the main corridor of annoyance.
“WOW,” SAID A GUY standing over their table, “You’re, like, totally her, aren’t you?”
“Darling,” said Adeline, “You must have me mistaken.”
“No,” said the guy, “You’re totally like her. You’re that woman from the Internet. Me and my friends have been watching that video, like, all week.”
“You have me sorely mistaken,” said Adeline. “I’m not her.”
“C’mon,” said the guy, “I, like, recognize you.”
“Like, no,” said Adeline. “You know, I’ve totally been getting this for a few days, right? The problem is that there’s a little, like, confusion. You’ve got me mistaken with M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch, but I’m not her. Like, I’m also, like, famous, which is why you recognize me, okay? My name is Marina Abramović. Do you, like, remember when Lady Gaga, like, went to the MoMA and stared into someone’s face? That was totally my face. I’m not M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch. I’m somebody else who’s somebody. I’m Marina Abramović. You know, The Artist is Present?”
“Oh, whoa,” said the guy. “My mistake. Can we take a selfie?”
ADELINE AND ERIK WILLEMS left Tartine. They walked towards Adeline’s apartment.
“I had no idea you could do other accents,” said Erik.
“Some of us,” said Adeline, “can be both the cupcake and the pastry.”
Erik Willems didn’t say anything. Adeline had long made him regret mentioning the cupcake or the pastry.
The whole time they were in Tartine, Erik Willems had sat clutched with anxiety. He was waiting for Adeline to mention the cupcake and the pastry. Tartine was, after all, a bakery.
“Do you know, I wonder if this is going to keep happening? It happened yesterday.”
“Someone recognized you?”
“For certainement, my dear,” said Adeline. “I was at the corner store. I let them take a picture. After that, I decided I’m simply going to lie to everyone and say that I’m Marina Abramović. They’ve been tormenting me with her name for three years, so why not embrace the pain? Do you think it’s possible that people out there in New York Land might be inquiring with Marina Abramović as to whether or not she’s M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch?”
Just then, a Google bus drove past.
chapter seventeen
The most visible sign of San Francisco’s gentrification was the appearance of white luxury buses which roamed the streets like vampires in search of a hissing blood feast.
These buses provided transportation to people who lived in the city and worked at tech companies in Silicon Valley.
They were private buses, which meant that they were available only to employees of companies in Silicon Valley.
The name around town for these buses was Google buses, after Google, the company with which they were most associated.
The Google buses worked on the theory that employees of tech companies had different ideas about life than their parents. They didn’t want to be in the suburbs and they didn’t want to own houses in Silicon Valley and they didn’t want to own cars.
So the buses allowed these employees to work for giant corporations while living in the city and experiencing the rich tapestry of the urban environment and its pleasures.
THE NECESSITY OF BEING A UNIQUE INDIVIDUALwho cared about living in the city while working for a faceless multibillion dollar corporation was one of the legacies of the Bay Area’s intolerable bullshit. This bullshit had been generated during the late 1960s and early 1970s by young people who mistook participatory capitalism for enlightenment.
In Dallas, the guys who worked for Exxon Mobil knew that they were destroying the environment and loved every minute, funneling oil lucre into God and Guns while having a good ol’ hoot and holler and venting their lust into sex-workers with poor literacy skills and breast implants.
On Wall Street, the guys who made capital from capital hung around in three piece suits, screaming in New Jersey accents about fucking people’s mothers in the ass while pouring gold flake champagne on their own genitalia.
In San Francisco, the generation of capital came with an oppressive narrative about both the investors, and the companies they invested in. They were offering services that changed the world and helped individuals achieve their greatest potential.
Twitter could not be described as it was: a mechanism by which teenagers tormented each other into suicide while obsessing about ephemeral celebrities and on which Adeline argued about whether or not she hated the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911.
Twitter was described as an outlet for freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Twitter was changing the world.
The Tenderloin was full of homeless people, drug addicts, and sex-workers. Many of these people were in very poor health.
There were people in the Tenderloin who were so poor that they were infected with tuberculosis, a disease which had been eradicated almost everywhere else in America.
A vast majority of the people with very poor health in the Tenderloin had a plethora of eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
This concentration of eumelanin was unusual. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of Black people in San Francisco had declined by 35.7%.
Twitter had been given $22,000,000 from the City of San Francisco to try and revitalize the Tenderloin.
Revitalization was institutionally racist code for adopting a policy of racial cleansing which made the neighborhood less welcoming to Black people.
While Twitter was changing the world on the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of 1355 Market Street, its employees could look down at Market Street and see crack addicted sex-workers having the stuffing beat out of them by people infected with tuberculosis.
It was a nice time to work for Twitter.
It was a shitty time to have tuberculosis.
GIVEN THE FACT that it was displacing an African-American population, the curious thing about Twitter was its popularity with Black people. Twitter was fashionable enough with Black people that this popularity had its own name: Black Twitter.
Like so much in American life, Black Twitter was a sinister burn engineered by people without eumelanin in their epidermises to exploit the labors of people with eumelanin in their epidermises.
The users of Black Twitter were supplying White people with effortless access to a body of language and thought which could be harvested and transformed into content on websites owned by White people.
The managers of these websites were very interested in demonstrating a fluency with Black culture but had little-to-no interest in hiring the people who lived it.
A fluency with Black culture would attract more advertisers. Actual Black people would scare advertisers.
Back in the good ol’ days, when White people wanted to steal culture, they actually had to, you know, like, spend time around Black people.
But in 2013, the story was very different.
The iPhone had changed everything.
TWITTER ITSELF USED Black Twitter to serve advertisements.
Twitter’s leadership and ownership structures were both remarkable and unremarkable for their total absence of Black people.
The only people making money off Black Twitter were White people.
According to eumelanin-rich Byron Crawford, who was the best writer of the new Millennium, there was a word for this.
Slavery.
GOOGLE WAS NOT the only corporation with buses. Apple, eBay, Electronic Arts, Facebook and Yahoo had their own buses. So did a multitude of smaller companies. Tens of thousands of workers were making a daily commute via the buses.
J. Karacehennem was mildly obsessed with the Google buses and told Adeline that they were the best evidence of J.G. Ballard having been a High Priest of the Future.
J. G. Ballard was a eumelaninless British author who came to prominence in the middle of the Twentieth Century. He had lived in a prison camp during World War Two. He wrote about weird sex and weird technology and weird sexual technology.
“At first,” said J. Karacehennem, “I thought the buses signaled that we were living in an early Ballard book, like maybe Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, where he writes about how people of the future would move beyond the perversions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and create new eroticisms. You know Crash is all about people who fuck whilst they crash cars. So I was thinking that maybe all the Google people were riding dirty in their buses with enormous erections and wet vaginas and spontaneously orgasming through the simple pleasure of the bus’s vibrations.
“Then I read Super-Cannes,” continued J. Karacehennem, “and realized we’re living in late period Ballard. Super-Cannes is about a complex on the Riviera where various corporations have their campuses and house their workers. The narrator discovers a crimewave that no one wants to discuss. He further discovers that it happens because there’s an organized program of barbarism for the complex’s corporate residents. They’re all taken out on buses and get into fights with Arab gangs in the surrounding cities and the cops are paid off to look the other way. Who’s gonna fuck with the big companies, and who really cares if their engineers are beating the shit out of a bunch of fucking ragheads, right?
“That’s my theory,” said J. Karacehennem. “I think the Google buses are taking employees around and getting them in gang fights. Why else are they so interested in maps? Do you think all that bullshit is really about making information free? Fuck no! Google is mapping the world so that they have a huge database of primo locations filled with the dispossessed. Google Street View is a map of the blood to be spilled.
“But they can’t fight Muslims, not in San Francisco. This city doesn’t have enough Muslims to ensure that every Google employee has the same opportunities for cross-faith violence. You can’t achieve peak Muslim-bashing with such a small sample of Mahometans. Which leaves Latinos and Asians. So that’s what happens. Every night at 4am, a prearranged number of Google employees gather together and get into huge fights with members of the Jackson Street Boyz and the 22 Boys and MS-13.”
“Whatever does your lady think of this bright idea?” asked Adeline.
“If I bring it up in polite society, she pretends that she doesn’t know me.”
“DARLING,” SAID ADELINE. “I hadn’t the slightest you were so fascinated by the buses. You must break bread and exchange heap big wampum of words with my friend Christine. She’s harboring some very dubious ideas about the whole thing.”
“Why haven’t I met her, anyway?” asked J. Karacehennem.
“Oh, Pip,” said Adeline, “Don’t you recollect our unfortunate encounter with that woman Sonja at Margaret Tedesco’s gallery? If so, do you perhaps recall your own behavior with regards to the poor girl?”
“What did I say?” asked J. Karacehennem. “I never remember.”
“As we three waited at the corner of 25th and Guerrero, she placed her winsome hand upon your shoulder. Which caused you to have rather an unfortunate response. You walked into out into the traffic and said that you’d rather be dead than spend a moment suffering her touch.”
“Oh right,” said J. Karacehennem. “Now I can remember.”
“I considered that perhaps you had revealed your inner bigot. I worried, darling, that a meeting with Christine might end the same.”
“You thought I was unpleasant to Sonja because she’s trans?”
“That’s the obvious conclusion,” said Adeline. “You’re very progressive, dear, but you’re so unpredictable. And you’re from Southeastern Massachusetts, darling. There’s an inner Masshole in you.”
“What the fuck, Adeline?” asked J. Karacehennem. “I wasn’t horrible because she’s trans. I was horrible because she’s a fucking dullard. I’m not transphobic! I’m just a snob! I’m a flaming liberal who believes in Jeffersonian Democracy!”
WHEN J. KARACEHENNEM SAID that he believed in Jeffersonian Democracy, he was using irony.
Irony was a spoken or written device that presents an intended meaning opposite of the stated one.
If you were speaking with irony, you might say of a very stupid person, “Yes, she is a very smart woman.” If you were speaking with irony, you might say of a very ugly man, “Yes, he is a handsome gentleman.”
Irony was not that different than the mechanism of advertising, with its two meanings, except that in advertising the second meaning was not inherently oppositional to the first.
Most Americans used the
adjective ironic to denote something other than a situation involving irony. When they were being ironic, or when something was ironic, they generally meant that there was a coincidence. Sometimes the coincidence was unfortunate.
If you were from California and the year was 2013, you might say something like, “It was, like, so ironic, because, you know, we both totally bought, like, red cars.”
There was nothing ironic about two people buying red cars. There was no underlying secondary meaning. Two people buying red cars is a coincidence.
MANY MORAL SCOLDS had adopted grammar as a place where they could make other people feel bad about themselves. These people tended to be disturbed by the apparent misuse of the words ironic and irony.
On one hand, they had a point. There really wasn’t anything ironic about two people buying cars of the same color.
On the other hand, the words irony and ironic were just symbols with shifting meaning given their value by a general agreement amongst members in a society.
They were like money. They were imaginary.
Or maybe they were more like the bullshit words in Baby’s Annie Zero or Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
Just some crap that someone made up once.
WHEN J. KARACEHENNEM said that he was a flaming liberal who believed in Jeffersonian Democracy, the irony did not derive from J. Karacehennem being a flaming liberal. He was indeed a flaming liberal.
As a flaming liberal, J. Karacehennem believed in an equality of people regardless of social constructs like sexual preference, race, gender and creed. As a flaming liberal, J. Karacehennem believed that the best way to achieve this equality, and address other ills, was through a reordering of society via governmental policies and the redistribution of wealth.
The irony in his statement derived from the fact that, as everyone knows, Jeffersonian Democracy was a wonderful fantasy about a nation comprised of farmers who hated a centralized government and embraced agrarian freedoms.