by Sarah Vowell
“He said,” says Roberts, “that he discovered Love Canal when he had hearings on it after people had been evacuated.”
Kristol, reading from a paper that is presumably either the Post or the Times, says, “Yeah, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I was the one that started it all.’”
Then The Late Show with David Letterman dreamed up a list of “The Top Ten Other Achievements Also Claimed by Al Gore.” “Number 5,” Letterman announces, “Pulled U.S. out of early ’90s recession by personally buying 6,000 T-shirts.
NUMBER 4: Started CBS situation comedy with Juan Valdez titled “Juan for Al, Al for Juan.”
NUMBER 3: Was inspiration for Ozzy Osbourne song “Crazy Train.”
NUMBER 2: Came up with popular catchphrase “Don’t go there, girlfriend.”
And the number one other achievement claimed by Al Gore: Gave mankind fire!
Initially, the students at Concord High were upset about the misquote. But the more they thought about it, and the more they watched the misquote evolve, they were really flabbergasted by the misrepresentation of Gore’s appearance at their school. Alyssa complains, “He was trying to say that kids can make a difference. He was trying to say what so many high school kids in this country don’t believe.”
Lucas understands that Gore was “running for president, so he has to be a bit selfish and kind of boost himself when he’s speaking, but the message—they totally missed the point of the entire story that he told. He was trying to make it a clear point for us that we need to get involved and that we should. And that we can do something to help. And the media didn’t even mention the message he was trying to explain or anything.”
Ashley thinks, “The actual quote itself was, I think, completely innocent. It wasn’t a ‘look how great I am, look what I did in Love Canal’ it was a ‘look how great you can be.’ That’s what his message was, and that’s what the papers overlooked.”
I played devil’s advocate with Ashley, asking her, So what? The reporters got one word wrong but they got the gist of what Gore was saying right. What would she say to that?
She replied, “I would say, ‘You’re wrong.’ You’re focusing on one little itty-bitty microscopic thing that when misquoted can mean something completely different but when quoted correctly it means a great thing for democracy and things like that.”
If I can come clean on whom I identify with the most in this story, it isn’t the students or their teacher. I identify with the New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye, who misheard a word. She was the one that started it all. I am convinced that this woman, whose job it is to follow around a man with two jobs—running for president and being vice president—is beyond overworked. I know this partly because the first chance she got to return my phone call about all of this was at 1:15 in the morning. This poor reporter, this gatekeeper of democracy, was getting her first break in the day in the middle of the night. And, considering that I am a writer who has publicly misspelled names, confused Sinclair Lewis with Upton Sinclair, and gotten who knows how many things wrong over the years, I am one pot who should not be calling the Gray Lady black. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post did publish corrections. And this is what Seelye told me. About the students of Concord High, she said, “These kids are well-intentioned. They’re paying attention. We did get one word wrong. But they are magnifying what happened. Gore did say, ‘I found a little town in upstate New York called Love Canal.’ He called the AP in Buffalo the next day and apologized for presuming to take credit for that.”
The journalists were in fact correct when they said that Love Canal was already a front-page story, an official national emergency, months before Al Gore ever held hearings. But Gore never claimed to have been the one to have first brought Love Canal to national attention. He only claimed to have held the first congressional hearings on it, which he did, after receiving that letter from Toone in 1978.
In the end, it’s possible that the main difference between the ways the reporters and the class heard Gore’s speech is that the reporters were listening for some new sound bite from Gore they hadn’t heard before, whereas the students were listening for Gore’s thoughts on school violence, an issue that is of grave concern to them, an issue Gore actually addressed. Their teacher Joanne McGlynn points out, “I think what shocks me though is that there seems, on some parts of the media that we’ve talked to, very little remorse. That surprises me. That it was just a word. I guess I have my own bias or perception as I look at the event. The week before Al Gore came, our entire school had to practice a lockdown procedure. And a lockdown procedure is something that I had never experienced except as a kid in Catholic school in Rhode Island in the early sixties. The nuns had us hiding under our desks or putting our heads down to protect us from nuclear fallout for when the Russians were going to bomb us. And in 1999 we were being asked to run through an event as though a sniper were out in the hallway. This came down as a recommendation from the state of New Hampshire, their safety planning group, and it just so happened that we had our first practice session the week before Al Gore came to Concord High School. So our principal came over the intercom and said, ‘Teachers, please implement the lockdown procedure.’ We knew ahead of time this was going to happen sometime during the next two days. I had to take my freshmen and move them away from the door, get them on the floor, turn their desks on their sides so they would be protected as much as they could be in case someone came into the room or attempted to come into the room with a gun. We had to be silent. I had to go out in the hallway and lock the door and grab any kid who might have been returning from the bathroom, hoping this kid was not the person we needed to worry about, grab that kid, pull him in, and ask my students to be quiet. I have to tell you, it was very unsettling. The thought that one of ours, one of our students could be out in the hallway trying to harm us—it’s a very complicated emotional response. Many of us were very uncomfortable during the lockdown. But we couldn’t show that to the kids, wanted to show the kids that they were safe and not to worry. So, I thought Gore did a good job talking about this issue. I thought this issue should be one of the prime ones in our presidential campaign, and I feared immediately when I heard Love Canal that, somehow, what had happened at Concord High would become a joke. And, in some ways, that is what happened.”
On his talk show Hardball, Chris Matthews chuckled. “Let’s talk about Al Gore and have some fun. We’ve gone from the serious part of the program, now here’s the hilarious part. Al Gore keeps taking a little bit of truth and building it up into this epochal role in history.”
Joanne sighs. “It just makes me sad that the wise-guy attitude seems to dominate the press right now. That’s what I pick up on. Not to pick on Chris Matthews, but he spent two nights having a blast with this story about Love Canal. Getting a big chuckle out of ‘Dan Quayle may not be able to spell potato but now Al Gore’s going to claim he invented it.’ Well, maybe where Chris works that seems like a funny thing to say, but where I work, it didn’t seem that funny. Where I work, pretending to be hiding behind desks with kids, afraid that Klebold and Harris are outside my door, it didn’t seem that funny. And I’m not saying our candidates should be untested, unquestioned, uncriticized. What I am saying, if that’s all we do, and if all we do is make fun of them, then we’re losing something too, I think.”
Ashley tells me, “I feel like some reporters are just saying what [the candidates] did wrong.” When I ask the sixteen-year-old what we lose when the press omits descriptions of how a candidate might actually make a good president, she answers, “I think we miss out on every reason to vote for them,”
At Concord High School, a politician actually spoke inspiringly and connected with the audience. Which, to me, is news. But no reporter reported this. And in fact these kinds of moments are routinely overlooked by the press. They’re barely part of our national political discourse. But why? For one thing, so much political speech is lies, spin, and misreprese
ntation, it’s understandable that journalists report these inspiring moments skeptically, if at all. And, beyond that, the way most of the press works is pretty much as you suspect; representatives of the news media carry around story lines of the candidates in their heads, and reporters light up when reality randomly corroborates these pictures.
One of the great mysteries of modern politics is which story lines get told and which get ignored. And, in the primary season, that story line is still up for grabs. John McCain’s story line—hero—threatened to become “hypocrite” in light of his helping a major donor with the FCC. Not long after George W. Bush flunked a foreign policy pop quiz, his name tag at the correspondents’ dinner was destined to read, “Hello, my name is Dunderhead.” Gore’s story line—that he’s a bore—is spiced up by this secondary story line: that he’s a braggart, that he takes credit for ridiculous things, for inventing the Internet and for being the real-life Oliver of Love Story. So of course the Love Canal misunderstanding screamed to reporters because it brought this particular fuzzy snapshot of Gore into sharper focus.
It is telling that both the reporter for the Times and the one for the Post heard the exact same word incorrectly, almost as if that was what they wanted to hear. Joanne McGlynn says that this is a seductive impulse for both reporters and voters. She says, “This editor for U.S. News & World Report called and said that; this was after he admitted that he was sorry they had published a misquote. He told me a story about George Bush, Sr., running for president in 1992. And I remember the story myself that George Bush went into a supermarket and was stunned to find a scanner. I guess he was used to old cash registers and made a comment that showed he was surprised to see a scanner. What this gentleman from U.S. News & World Report told me was, actually, the pool reporter got that story wrong, that it was actually some kind of new scanner that Bush remarked on. But that comment then became the iconic moment for Bush being out of touch with Middle America. And that was it. I think that might have hurt Bush big time, Now, it turned out—if this man from U.S. News & World Report is right—not to be accurate. Now, if it wasn’t accurate, was it not true? I mean, was Bush out of touch with Middle America? It’s the same thing going back to Gore: Does Gore take credit? It makes me question. And I have to say, I am going to keep my eyes open in a way I hadn’t before, particularly when things automatically fit my mind-set. I’m going to be a little careful. It didn’t surprise me that maybe President Bush didn’t know about a scanner. But if he did, it’s too bad that got out there. It’s not fair.”
I looked at Joanne McGlynn’s syllabus for her media studies course, the one she handed out at the beginning of the year, stating the goals of the class. By the end of the year, she hoped her students would be better able to challenge everything from novels to newscasts, that they would come to identify just who is telling a story and how that person’s point of view affects the story being told. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this lesson has been learned. In fact, just recently, a student came up to McGlynn and told her something all teachers dream of hearing. The girl told the teacher that she was listening to the radio, singing along with her favorite song, and halfway through the sing-along she stopped and asked herself, “What am I singing? What do these words mean? What are they trying to tell me?” And then, this young citizen of the republic jokingly complained, “I can’t even turn on the radio without thinking anymore.”
Pop-A-Shot
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.
Pop-A-Shot is not a video game. It involves shooting real, if miniature, basketballs for forty seconds. It’s embarrassing how giddy the three of us get when it’s our turn to put money into the machine. (Often, we have to stand behind some six-year-old girl who bogarts the game and whose father keeps dropping in quarters even though the kid makes only about 4 points if she’s lucky and we are forced to glare at the back of her pigtailed head, waiting just long enough to start questioning our adulthood and how by the time our parents were our age they were beholden to mortgages and PTA meetings and here we are, stuck in an episode of Friends.)
Finally it’s my turn. A wave of balls slide toward me and I shoot, making my first basket. I’m good at this. I’m not great. The machine I usually play on has a high score of 72, and my highest score is 56. But considering that I am five foot four, that I used to get C’s in gym, and that I campaigned for Dukakis, the fact that I am capable of scoring 56 points in forty seconds is a source of no small amount of pride. Plus, even though these modern men won’t admit it, it really bugs Joel and Steve to get topped by a girl.
There are two reasons I can shoot a basketball: black-eyed peas and Uncle Hoy. I was a forward on my elementary school team. This was in Oklahoma, back when girls played half-court basketball, which meant I never crossed over to the other team’s side, which meant all I ever had to do was shoot, a bonus considering that I cannot run, pass, or dribble. Blessed with one solitary athletic skill, I was going to make the most of it. I shot baskets in the backyard every night after dinner. We lived out in the country, and my backboard was nailed to an oak tree that grew on top of a hill. If I missed a shot, the ball would roll downhill into the drainage ditch for the kitchen sink, a muddy rivulet flecked with corn and black-eyed peas. So if the ball bounced willy-nilly off the rim, I had to run after it, retrieve it from the gross black-eyed pea mud, then hose it off. So I learned not to miss.
My mother’s brother, Hoy, was a girls’ basketball coach. Once he saw I had a knack for shooting, he used to drill me on free throws, standing under the hoop at my grandmother’s house, where he himself learned to play. And Hoy, who was also a math teacher—he had gone to college on a dual math-basketball scholarship—revered the geometrical arc of the swish. Hoy hated the backboard, and thought players who used it to make anything other than layups lacked elegance. And so, if I made a free throw that bounced off the backboard before gliding through the basket, he’d yell, “Doesn’t count.” Sometimes, trash-talking at Pop-A-Shot, I bark that at Joel and Stephen when they score their messy bank shots. “Doesn’t count!” The electronic scoreboard, unfortunately, makes no distinction for grace and beauty.
I watch the NBA. I lived in Chicago during the heyday of the Bulls. And I have noticed that in, as I like to call it, the moving-around-basketball, the players spend the whole game trying to shoot. There’s all that wasted running and throwing and falling down on cameramen in between baskets. But Pop-A-Shot is basketball concentrate. I’ve made 56 points in forty seconds. Michael Jordan never did that. When Michael Jordan would make even 40 points in a game it was the lead in the eleven o’clock news. It takes a couple of hours to play a moving-around-basketball game. Pop-A-Shot distills this down to less than a minute. It is the crack cocaine of basketball. I can make twenty-eight baskets at a rate of less than two seconds per.
Joel, an excellent shot, also appreciates this about Pop-A-Shot. He likes the way it feels, but he’s embarrassed by how it sounds stupid when he describes it to other people, (He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.) Joel plays in a fairly serious adult basketball league in New York. One night, he left Stephen and me in the arcade and rushed off to a—this hurt my feelings—“real” game. That night, he missed a foul shot by two feet and made the mistake of admitting to the other players that his arms were tired from throwing miniature balls at a shortened hoop all afternoon. They laughed and laughed. “In the second overtime,” Joel told me, “when the opposing team fouled me with four seconds left and gave me the opportunity to shoot from the line for the game, they looked mighty smug as they took their positions along the key. Oh, Pop-A-Sho
t guy, I could hear them thinking to their smug selves. Hell never make a foul shot. He plays baby games. Wa-wa-wa, little Pop-A-Shot baby, would you like a zwieback biscuit? But you know what? I made those shots, and those sons of bitches had to wipe their smug grins off their smug faces and go home thinking that maybe Pop-A-Shot wasn’t just a baby game after all.”
I think Pop-A-Shot’s a baby game. That’s why I love it. Unlike the game of basketball itself, Pop-A-Shot has no standard socially redeeming value whatsoever. Pop-A-Shot is not about teamwork or getting along or working together. Pop-A-Shot is not about getting exercise or fresh air. It takes place in fluorescent-lit bowling alleys or darkened bars. It costs money. At the end of a game, one does not swig Gatorade. One sips bourbon or margaritas or munches cupcakes. Unless one is playing the Super Shot version at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, in which case, one orders the greatest appetizer ever invented on this continent—a plate of cheeseburgers.
In other words, Pop-A-Shot has no point at all. And that, for me, is the point. My life is full of points—the deadlines and bills and recycling and phone calls. I have come to appreciate, to depend on, this one dumb-ass little passion. Because every time a basketball slides off my fingertips and drops perfectly, flawlessly, into that hole, well, swish, happiness found.
California as an Island
Noticing an Audubon ornithological engraving in the hall of a stranger’s apartment, I found myself humming the opening bars of Nirvana’s “Lithium” and craving a burrito. Audubon’s birds take me back to a specific time and place—not the eastern backwoods of the 1820s but San Francisco when I was twenty-four. As a teen beatnik, I had dreamed of growing up and joining some Bay Area subculture. I just imagined my subculture would have a little more razzle-dazzle than the demimonde of antiquarian prints and maps. But managing a gallery owned by a notorious dealer named Graham Arader was the only job I could get, and I was grateful for it. Before he hired me, I had been temping for months, spending entire days inserting plastic tabs into file folders or begging the Chinese callers to the Chinese television station to please speak English as the Chinese receptionist is taking a personal day.