"But you Mis-Read..."

Not to be a Maureen Dowd defender, but perhaps some of the New Media boys-to-Men -- and the women who want to love them -- aren't reading what's written, but too much between the lines based on insider gossip.

This, for example:

Angle could have told the poignant story of her German immigrant great-grandmother who died trying to save laundry hanging on the clothesline in a South Dakota prairie fire, which Angle wrote about in her self-published book, “Prairie Fire.” But instead the former teacher and assemblywoman began hurling cafeteria insults. “I live in a middle-class neighborhood in Reno, Nevada,” she said. “Senator Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C.”

The keywords might be:
immigrant great-grandmother
and
self-published.

I've been reading Scott Eyman's Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. (review here, to come)

Scott's style is that of a historian: he gets the backstory, and starts not with his subjects' birth, but a generation or two back, when possible, to show how they got where they started...* (click the link: my favorites of his are John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, Mary Pickford.)


As a reader, if I've learned one thing from his style, it's how telling that backstory is -- details count. Particularly in shaping the persons who went out and created so much of our American style -- Lubitsch with his (on film) intelligent, high-class, adult sexual touch; "Pickford" who went from Canadian Gladys Smith to Hollywood businesswoman unparallel; and of course, Ford who helped millions picture our shared American mythology of Settling the West, and DeMille who did the same for our Biblical heritage.

You could use this style fictitiously, to craft a complex classic; you could use it politically, to tell an appealing populist tale...

But it only works if the reader is a trained thinker, practiced at evaluating what the politicians routinely serve up and judging for oneself what that backstory is worth. Many people -- good, credentialed, around the block enough you'd think they'd know better -- bit on the Obama story: a bi-racial man with his background story and community/professorial work surely qualified to bring people together to seek common-sense solutions to head-on address the problems of the past...

Except, you got an idea that the image was too ... crafted. That not enough time had gone into seasoning the product; that it was perhaps a race to succeed -- this young black man more than his causes -- by collecting titles and making connections and using them as a step up the ladder called ... Movin' On.

So now, with another election coming... if we want to, we can think about what these candidates offer. A great-grandmother immigrant... is that the same as having the Old World in the kitchen, watching the pocketbook? Is it the same even, as being raised by the next generation, who might have adopted such an outsider or thrifty mindset? Or is it just a label by then, something to pull out and wave in a campaign to boost the "immigrant" creds?

Same with the "self published" dig. You can kinda get away with whatever details you want to present if you're not publishing under the auspice of a major publishing house (and with the memoir scandals of the past, I suppose, sometimes even then).

But that classification -- that raises red flags to thinking readers everywhere. I don't think Dowd has evidence suggesting that the "Pioneer Ancestor Woman Dies Trying to Save Family Clothes from the WarshLine!" is untrue necessarily. I just think, if you read that paragraph and missed the subtle snarkiness (in a good way, really -- who wants loud and in-your-face nastiness, when a dropped line or two will work just the same?), it's more on you than the writer.


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* I was at the public library last year, and happened to pick up a copy of Bob Dylan's, Chronicles Volume One. What a wonderful memoir -- how he captures the early essence of himself, telling little stories through details and recollections. Showing the impact of this or that family occurrence, not just telling us ... about some great-grandmother story passed down in the family, for example.

Is that Eyman's voice helping Dylan tell his story, I wondered? Hired by Simon & Schuster to help ghost-write/recollect the Dylan autobiography along? I knew he worked with Robert Wagner -- landed on the NYT bestseller list, in a commercial way no Pickford or Lubitsch or Ford can with these days of dying generational readership...

Just speculating that's Eyman's style at work in those Chronicles, but wouldn't that be something if one day, we've got enough Trained and Thinking readers out there -- not only to vote intelligently and leave the gossipy girl stuff for high school halls -- but to expect those kind of intelligent and telling details, routinely, in our fictional stories too.

Complex characters operating in an intelligent world of maximum choices. Now there's a story...