Slow news. I now think of it as a performance. How to perform the news so that it reveals its inner self. Or something like that.
The Daily Show curated the “Trump Presidential Twitter Library” like an art gallery exhibition, each tweet presented with the gilt-edged frames that would have belonged in Trump’s hotels. Imagine then the broad, ornate, faux-royal frame surrounding the reproduction of Trump’s birtherism tweet. There was accompanying commentary. An official-sounding, mocking description, “Masterworks from the Collection,” followed by the title “Birth of a Birther”—and then this pitch-perfect and truly hilarious piece of satire, the apotheosis of the language of art criticism:
Critics may disagree on the greatest of Trump’s tweets, but all cite “Birth of a Birther” as his first unquestionable masterpiece. Taken as a standalone work, one can marvel at the audacity of his creative imagination—the delicacy of the halo of the quotations encircling “extremely credible.” Yet it is as a preface to Trump’s most creative period that “Birth of a Birther” finds its true strength—achieving metaphorical “birthing” of the artist’s identity by questioning the literal birth of another. Contradictory forces thus become complementary, as Trump is clearly inspired by the yin and yang first described in ancient China, a known currency manipulator.
8.
Sue is not as troubled as I am by all the falsehood around us. On the path below my window, I saw her walking with LeeAnn, the filmmaker from Connecticut, and I went down to join them. They caught sight of me and LeeAnn cheerfully called out, “Yo, Cronkite.” Sue wanted to know how my daughter was doing and I told them that the child had bounced back. She laughed and said, “Did you talk to the waitstaff about all this? Armando is pissed that the soccer matches have been canceled.”
LeeAnn was telling a story. Her younger sister is a nurse working the night shift at a hospital in Massachusetts, and LeeAnn had called her to find out how they are preparing for the coming pandemic. But because LeeAnn loves dogs, her sister, the nurse, had a different kind of horror story for her. A couple had come to the hospital the previous night. The man had a bloody arm that he held cradled in his other hand. He was calm; his wife, however, was pretty hysterical. The wife told the nurse that they had been fighting at home and when the husband flipped the coffee table, her dog flew at him and latched on to his arm. The amount of blood he had lost was unbelievable and now here they were in the emergency room. LeeAnn said that her sister tried to calm the woman, telling her that the surgeon on call was the best they had and her husband was going to be okay. But the woman sobbed, inconsolable. “I’m crying for my dog,” she said. “My husband now has his excuse to put him down.”
“Oh no, that’s terrible,” Sue said.
I waited for LeeAnn to say something about her sister and her fears regarding COVID. But Sue wanted to know where the sister lived and then the two women began talking about a town off Highway 84.
“Sue,” I said, a bit abruptly when there was a pause in their conversation, “I thought of you today when I came across a note in my scrapbook where I had asked if things have come to such a sorry pass because we are distracted.”
“It’s not a new problem,” Sue said. “It was actually noted first two thousand five hundred years ago but now it’s even worse. Plato, the Stoics, Epicurus, the Abhidhamma, Kama Sutra, the Zhuangzi—all worry about our relationship to pleasure and how it can make us unhappy. The new technology amplifies this.”
“The note in my scrapbook had a clipping attached to it,” I said. “Do you know the name George Monbiot? He argues that the media is to be blamed if our attention is diverted. Also, that the greatest environmental threat isn’t oil. It is the media. It misdirects us. Every day it tells us that issues of mind-numbing irrelevance are more important than the collapse of our life support systems.”
Unfazed, Sue said simply, “It comes with the territory. You cannot, on the one hand, give people the democratic right to have blogs and websites but, on the other hand, expect everyone to publish scientifically vetted truth.”
As we walked, she talked in detail about the rise of print culture in America, how, between the years 1700 and 1765, 75 percent of the printers brought out newspapers. Did they only publish the objective truth that one of those printers, none other than Benjamin Franklin himself, claimed? No. But without these printers doing what they did there would have been no idea of the nation.
“This is a necessary conversation,” Sue said.
Okay, Sue, I said to myself when I was back in my room. My novel is in that fight then.
9.
In his Paris Review interview, Gabriel García Márquez has this to say about facts: “In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work.”
Márquez probably did not have in mind bad fiction or fake news but the same principle holds. A single fact provides a tenuous bridge over a gaping abyss of misinformation. But that flimsy bridge is all that is needed by the army of online trolls.
10.
Trump’s rise has given birth to so many memes about fiction. Red hats, resembling MAGA hats, but with the legend Make Orwell Fiction Again. A book display at a store, with titles like The Plot Against America, under the sign “alternative facts” or what we like to call fiction. And post-apocalyptic fiction moved to our current affairs section. I do not know in which category the book that I’m writing will be put. This is a part of the confusion of our times.
Talking of Orwell, though, I am now halfway through 1984. Winston Smith and the girl with dark hair, her name is Julia, have slept together, which Smith understands as a blow struck against the Party and, therefore, a political act. Julia is resourceful and pleasure seeking; in contrast, Smith appears pedantic and a bit dull. Julia is street-smart and finds ways to subvert the dictates of the Party. Smith is more timid, but he is also alert to larger questions, like that of the falsification of the past. He remembers the past, which has been obliterated. A time outside this time. Is that why readers went looking for 1984 after Trump was elected? Literature as an expression of a tiny will to freedom.
* * *
—
P.S. TWO OR three days after I had made the previous notation I came upon a section in 1984 where Orwell fearlessly plants a whole essay, although the more accurate word would be a treatise, entitled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.” It goes on for some thirty-odd pages! How post-! How meta-! There is a lucid section on the necessity of war for a society to maintain its own oppressive hierarchies—all brilliant in an old-fashioned way, but didn’t editors and reviewers tell Orwell he couldn’t just insert an essay in the middle of a novel? I had come to 1984 because I had been told it was an iconic work of dystopian fiction about what we now call fake news, but I also take heart from Orwell’s bold experimentation. I have little doubt that he thought of it also as a political act.
11.
I lie awake at night. This has been happening a lot lately. This villa—but also the act of writing—seems so far away from the real world. In saying this, I’m reporting from a land called despair. In my hometown in India, but this is true not just of that town, the atmosphere outside the jail on the day those accused of murder or rape or rioting are released is like a wedding. These men are guilty of everything they have been accused of, but because they have power or money, they are able to walk free. Their supporters gather outside the prison gates to celebrate. Car horns blare. There is music, also slogans, taunts, insults, and, of course, sweets. The foreheads of the victorious are smeared with red tilak. They raise their arms to quiet the crowd, join palms to show gratitude. If by any bad luck a girl from a minority community happens to be crossing the street, she is offered a sweet, and, if she says no, someone grips her arms while someone else thrusts the sweet inside her mouth before wiping h
is hands on her chest.
12.
If you are from India, you perhaps share a memory, which is a collective memory, which means you know it even if you didn’t experience it. An animal’s head is thrown inside a place of worship. By late evening, a part of the city has gone up in flames. The engineering of public violence through the manufacture of rumors.
Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas opens with the scene of a government official paying an untouchable man to kill a pig. (The upper castes thought of themselves as the only touchables. Many still do.) The animal’s head is thrown on the steps of a mosque that evening. The untouchable realizes he has been made an unwitting accomplice to a riot. Sahni is constructing a secular critique of what in the subcontinent we call communal politics.
Nowadays it is all happening on WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant-messaging service. About 200 million Indians are WhatsApp subscribers, making India the biggest market for the social media platform. WhatsApp is free and easy to use; it consumes less data than Facebook or Twitter. Journalist Snigdha Poonam has reported that “Indians produce the majority of the 55 billion WhatsApp messages sent every day,” covering the gamut from family photos to political propaganda. Poonam adds that while WhatsApp is “the primary source of news for Indians,” what is circulated there in the guise of news is often fake. I believe this makes Indians the biggest consumers of rumors or fake news. Poonam’s conclusion is more sober: “The consequences can be deadly,” she writes. “Rumors spread over the service are killing people in India.”
13.
Why must one slow-jam the news? Because all that is new will become normal with astonishing speed. You will go to visit your father and discover that he has pledged himself to the service of the Great Leader. Or you will visit your friend’s house and it will take a minute or more to realize that a meeting is under way and now everyone is looking at you with suspicion. You notice one fine day that all the signs on the road have changed. Your town has a new name. Dogs have grown fat on flesh torn from corpses lining the street where you grew up. The beautiful tree outside your window is dead, has been dead for some time, and has, in fact, just now burst into flames.
14.
I’m drawn back momentarily to the novel I had come here to write. I want to think of Enemies of the People not just as a dull, didactic act, but also as a performance. Except such an artistic exercise would also be an experiment. An experiment from which you can draw a conclusion.
Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974, Belgrade. In this work, proposed as a “trust exercise,” the artist told viewers she would not move for six hours no matter what they did to her. Abramović placed seventy-two objects, everything from flowers and a feather boa to a knife and a loaded pistol, on a table near her and invited viewers at this performance to use them as they wished. (A placard on the table said: “Rhythm 0. INSTRUCTIONS: There are 72 objects on the table that can be used on me as desired. PERFORMANCE: I am the object. During this time I take the full responsibility.”) I read a report that said viewers were initially “peaceful and timid, but it escalated to violence quickly.” Another report said that “audience members were modest and timid at first” and then they became “more bold” before becoming “aggressive.” The list of the audience’s actions is both vivid and disturbing: “They poured oil on her head. They pricked her with the thorns of the rose. They cut her clothing. They cut her. One participant actually licked her blood.” When I read those words, I thought that what might have motivated Abramović was her curiosity about her audience and its benevolence. Hence the “trust exercise.” I wondered whether the question shifted once she had experienced the violence. (“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed…”) I’m now projecting, of course, but what I think Abramović was left with at the end was a question similar to the one with which I started this book: Will the person standing next to the one who is doing tremendous violence to you step in to put a stop to it? To a small extent, this is exactly what happened during the performance. “They carried her around the room half-naked, then put her on a wooden table and stabbed a knife into the table between her legs. One participant put a bullet in the gun and pointed it at her head, and held it there, until another audience member eventually pushed the gun away.” Another account: “In Rhythm 0, the audience divided itself into those who sought to harm Abramović (holding the loaded gun to her head) and those who tried to protect her (wiping away her tears).” In fact, according to this source, Abramović hadn’t set the performance limit of six hours—it was the protective audience members who insisted that, given the violence on display, the performance be stopped.
Is that the story that her experiment tells—good persons will step in when social harm is being done? No. Let’s take note of what happened when, at the end of six hours, the performance was over, and Abramović, tears in her eyes, blood dripping from her neck, walked toward her audience. According to one writer, “The audience scattered. Nobody wanted to confront the active, animated version of the passive figure they had been abusing. For me, this performance art is a powerful demonstration of what happens when people are given the message that it’s acceptable to denigrate a human being. Humanity is cruelest when presented with a passive victim, and that’s why would-be oppressors first seek to silence their victims.”
The artist had wanted to make her spectators also her collaborators. She was successful in that aim. But if one is searching for a story to fit the present moment, it is hard to resist drawing a lesson from what happened when the performance was actually over. The social space will change under the agency of an object turning into a subject.
15.
A clipping in my notebook. This news item is from The New York Times, January 29, 2017. Here are the first two paragraphs from the story:
Type the word refugees into Facebook and some alarming “news” will appear about a refugee rape crisis, a refugee flesh-eating disease epidemic and a refugee-related risk of female genital mutilation—none of it is true.
For the months leading up to the presidential election, and in the days since President Trump took office, ultraconservative websites like Breitbart News and Infowars have published a cycle of eye-popping claims about refugees. And it is beginning to influence public perception, experts say.
16.
In August 2018 The New York Times carried a story headlined “Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests.” The report cited the work of researchers at the University of Warwick who studied one particular detail common to every antirefugee attack—3,335, over two years—in Germany. “Towns where Facebook use was higher than average…reliably experienced more attacks on refugees.” The link was universal, applying to communities of different sizes. A one–standard deviation rise above national average in per person Facebook usage, the research revealed, signaled a rise in attacks on refugees of 50 percent. Concomitantly, when there were power outages in areas with high Facebook usage, the attacks dropped significantly.
17.
In March 2019 I came across this mention of Facebook and mental health. “According to a Verge report, Facebook’s content moderators get paid $28,000 a year and often end up with PTSD from looking at awful stuff all day.”
18.
I just learned that about a week ago, on the evening of February 25, an eighty-five-year-old Muslim woman (“older than our country,” someone wrote on Twitter) was burnt alive after a Hindu mob set fire to her house in Gamri Extension, Delhi.
19.
Many of the notes in my journal are about the news. But there are many that are also experiments. It is possible I was thinking of Vaani. Her response to everything that is fake is to design an experiment to clarify what our assumptions are. She stresses that our experiments need not be complicated at all. When I come across a clipping in my scrapbook about a small experiment conducted in an office kitchen at a Britis
h university, I think of my dear wife, who is a continent and an ocean away. No word from her so far today. The kitchen experiment went like this: People at the office made tea or coffee for themselves and paid for it on an honor system by dropping money into a box. This had gone on for years. Then, someone put up a picture of a pair of eyes that appeared to be looking directly at the observer. After this was done—the two wide-open eyes staring at the tea or coffee drinkers—the contributions went up by three times.
I understand the seductive appeal of stories based on experiments. They appear to us as truth; they are often easy to grasp; and they seem to reveal something crucial about ourselves. I have never consumed these stories without a feeling of guilt. Human behavior is reduced to a formula, the soul exposed as a mechanism, functional and predictable. When the truth is, it is only when I’m surprised, as when I learn how wrong I was about someone I knew, that I know I’m most alive.
Writers are perhaps predisposed to not hold experiments in high regard. In a novel that I was reading last fall, I came across a joke. The joke appealed to me, partly because it was funny but partly because I had started taking an interest in experiments involving animals and was struck by how cruel scientists could be to the animals they were studying. (My own observation, casual, private, has not been tested or peer-reviewed.) Anyway, here’s the joke:
A scientist received a grant to study fleas. He would shout “Jump,” and measure how far the flea jumped. After a while the exercise got boring for the scientist because the flea always jumped up the same distance. So, the scientist started pulling off the flea’s legs, first one and then another. The distance got shorter and shorter, until finally he had pulled off all six legs and the flea didn’t jump at all.
A Time Outside This Time Page 16