Moods & trends, inc.
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey MOODS & TRENDS, INC. MEDIA, YUPPIES & ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS MY friend Dan Herr has wondered if there isn't a commissar or at least a committee which decides what...
...It is nice to think that some day the New York Times might not look very different from one of my favorites, the National Examiner, which recently offered one of the best headlines in newspaper history...
...In some ways the method used by journalism is like filling in the lines between the dots and seeing a picture there...
...Never mind that people who know nothing of either Islam or fundamentalism feel that they know what they have heard when someone speaks of Islamic fundamentalism...
...a few years ago environmental issues were big...
...Those voices remind me of the moment in a horserace just after the gates are lifted...
...A lot of kids in Des Moihes and Indianapolis turned into flower children because they read about them in newsmagazines or saw something about them on TV...
...The press does keep us informed, in a loose way, about some of what goes on in the world...
...MEDIA, YUPPIES & ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS MY friend Dan Herr has wondered if there isn't a commissar or at least a committee which decides what issues we are allowed to consider important...
...What constituted Yuppie style...
...If Congress is boneheaded enough to listen to Reagan on Central America we may have a war again, and with it all of the politics on campus you like...
...and hearing a young long-haired guy in a natural linen shirt say, "You know, the two biggest pleasures in life are balling and being nice to people...
...It struck me that at some point he had decided to be like that, just as people had to work at the hip accent — there was a funny pronunciation of the letter "o," a little "e" sound worked in there, as in "ya kneow," which is sounded more like "ya knew" than "ya know...
...Given the fact that every single one of us is going to die, how can anyone care about Michael Jackson...
...In the meantime, important but difficult stories are passed over or covered lightly...
...Their decisions, like ours, are made arbitrarily within obvious limits...
...While a good many of the people who came in to see us for advice or sought to do alternative service as conscientious objectors were sincerely dedicated to nonviolence, there were others who just didn't want to be bothered with the war, one was concerned that it would interfere with his rock band's practice...
...And it would be just as lightweight and finally unreal as all the Yuppie stuff...
...The obvious thing Commonweal: 200 about Yuppies is that they don't really exist...
...Fundamentalism" may simply be a pejorative word, meaning something no more accurate than "you know, the crazy kind of Islam...
...other lines could give another story...
...There is something which should strike us funny about headlines and the voices of the people who read us the news on radio and television...
...But even here there is a problem — for example, the press refers frequently to "Islamic fundamentalism" as if this coupling of words had clear meaning...
...Journalistic generalizations about my generation came up against too many contradictions to make them very impressive...
...JOHN GARVEY 5 April 1985: 201...
...we do not want to have to work at them...
...I was a draft counselor during that period and saw how protest fell off sharply when the lottery defused the campuses...
...Sometimes specific things happen which the media must record and analyze, and it can be argued that what happens in Lebanon is more important, internationally, than the situation in Northern Ireland because it is more likely to involve the superpowers, or because of its connection to the international implications of a certain sort of Islam...
...Phrases like "our lead story tonight is . . ." ought to make us ask, "Who says...
...But when Time and Newsweek share the same unimportant cover stories about so many things, so often, you know that some shallow demon is abroad spooking editors with the possibility that the other guy might sell more magazines...
...then the nuclear freeze was important...
...Moods can have political significance, of course...
...If some people become Yuppies, even call themselves by that name, because they see something about Yuppies on magazine covers, what is wrong with us...
...It is hard from this distance to see the difference between what we thought of as the best and the worst nineteenth-century papers...
...the plight of the farmers will be with us for awhile, just as, a few months ago, the quality of American education was considered front-page news...
...It is hard to know which gives more pleasure — to see Sharon or Time look arrogant and stupid — and there is a pleasure in seeing one arrogance pitted against the other...
...The illusion of having been informed matters to us more than the more difficult task of really learning something...
...You see almost nothing in the leading newspapers and newsmagazines about the pollution done by paper mills, a major kind, and the reason might be because of the fact that they are frequently owned by major publishing companies...
...I don't mean to pretend that I am immune to the appeals of cheap journalism...
...At best they were descriptions of a shifting mood...
...The problem is that the lines are never as real as the dots, but the lines are what we see...
...We want things simple and summed up...
...It took a war to get people political...
...But there was also a lot of what now gets labeled Yuppie self-interest going around...
...You can't go with a lead story about Princess Di if World War III has just started...
...it will be hard to distinguish between the stuff Time and Newsweek and the New York Times and the Washington Post all think matters and the cheapest supermarket papers...
...I wish there were a Pulitzer formings like this...
...I remember being in one of my town's first "head shops" (remember them...
...Time and Westmoreland vs...
...Why does People sell so many copies...
...While journalism is right to report these things, and may be forgiven for its generalizations about Yuppies and flower children and the Committed Youth of the Sixties, it tends not to look at the more important questions, one of which is why we need to be distracted by fads this way...
...Editors and writers and reporters are all normally distracted and bored people like ourselves...
...The point is not that there are not vitally important stories to be done on any or all of these issues...
...The problem is that we can take its urgency too seriously...
...Thus Northern Ireland is less important than Lebanon...
...in the same way, "really" became "rilly...
...CBS trials...
...What has happened is that journalists have decided to focus on a certain sort of person and have decided that this type represents the age, just as flower children or protesters were supposed to tell us something about the sixties...
...But as bad as the presence of Sharon and Westmoreland on the planet may be, the cultural influence of the press, its long-term effect, is more powerful...
...Part of what prompts me to write about this is the self-importance of the press, as revealed in the coverage given the Sharon vs...
...We were actually reduced to the point — "we'' being a couple of high school kids and their parents — of arguing over what a Yuppie was...
...Columbia Journalism Review is particularly good...
...How old were they...
...They may tell us something, but what they tell us doesn't matter much...
...What impressed me during the sixties was that people were as much creatures of the media as anything else...
...Anyway, the headline I have loved best in recent years, one which made me buy the newspaper to take home, cherish, and share with all of my friends, was: CABBAGE PATCH DOLL STRANGLES ITS MOM It was an agent of the Devil, says researcher...
...A good way to get a clue to the holes in journalism is to pay attention to the best inside reviews of it...
...All of this descended on me during a recent family discussion...
...I do think that in a hundred years it will all look alike to us...
...Journalism and journalistic thinking rule our age...
...I guess the main point of this is to suggest that editors and journalists are as sweaty-palmed and self-interested as anyone else who ever tried to convince you that what he had to sell you was the real thing...
...But looking at other dots and...
...When a magazine or newspaper or television special informs us of a "trend" which ties a number of things together and makes us think we understand, we feel a combination of relief and personal importance...
...In France, land of moods taken too seriously, the turn from left to right in philosophical circles is interesting and may have some interesting effects...
...The spread of these styles is really (or rilly) no more significant than the spread of "have a nice day...
...As to the notion that young people in the sixties were somehow more committed to social change than they are now — that has its share of truth, but not as much as some people think...
...You can look at the career orientation of young Americans, combine it with a better economy and more spending, draw lines, and come up with Yuppies...
...Fundamentalism is a term which doesn't really apply to any sort of Islam, but by connecting the word to Islam the press seems to mean the fanatical sort of thing Iran has gone in for...
...Let's say an editor decided to take a look at the Sanctuary movement, the continuing environmental and anti-nuclear protests, the outpouring of concern over Ethiopia, resistance to the administration's adventurism in Central America, and the work of such groups as the Community for Creative Nonviolence on behalf of the homeless, he or she could draw lines between those dots and come up with a cover story about the ways in which the late eighties are like the late sixties...
...Weren't there always people like that around...
...we can think that the world it presents us with is the world which matters most, and we can even be led to believe that the images of the world we find in newspapers and magazines are adequate...
...What is it in us that thinks the fact that some young men and women want to be stockbrokers and make money is news...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 7
