Personal Loyalties

He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact. Just because... we found him "entertaining." --Peter Sarsgaard as Charles Lane

A television commercial when a freshly resigned case manager still had access to cable through a defunct company. One question Americans might ask is how we enforce anti-trust laws when Comcast is the sole provider of pay for view, despite diverse distributors like Netflix and Amazon and Verizon. Verizon is a now redundant spin off of AT&T, but it is a communications utility. Netflix I never fully comprehended but suppose it started as a rental agent. Amazon is a retailer, and now all these corporate models have there own cable box.

In 1997 I was still in job divorce mode which seemed, as a rupture, to take forever to heal, and there was the commercial for The New Republic. I called, subscribed to the print edition, knowing nothing, certainly not that Marty Peretz was insane. I discovered that later on my own in my dialogues with TNR, particularly with Michelle Cottle, but in 97 I read a contributor's article about lice and typhus and old world Jewish quarrels, and fell in love with the writing. I wanted to write like that, doubted I ever could, and understand why David Plotz and Lane want to kill Stephen Glass. I'm a million miles removed from Airforce One's onflight magazine and part of me wants to kill Stephen Glass. TNR has been much changed and diminished in these 17 years. One of their interns was nice to me when I pitched, and I've recounted this, and still get horny over the fact that The New Republic was nice to me and I did nothing with that capital out of fear and intimidation. I emailed them shit on spec later but I myself knew it was shit on spec; that door had closed because I feared to assert myself to get at the former corrupt bastard who ran this city, John Street. I met Street without wearing a brassiere without ever intending to do that. There was a gathering in the parking lot and I had a sudden craving for a burger and threw on shit clothes and rolled down and there was Black Mafia himself and I died. Being ever the politician, he grasped my shoulder and asked how I was doing. No idea I hated him and his excuse for a brother.

Shattered Glass doesn't work as a film because it is too close to reality of events which have damaged us all, and yet, Stephen's breach of ethics, his fabrications, his plagiarism, and the exposure of other notorious cookers of truth who followed, point to a distinctly modern problem as old as the hills. We don't like being drawn in for fools by more temperate psychopaths, remain fascinated by such villains, and don't look too closely at demarcations, such as the fact that bias builds its own slant. I have read John B Judis in TNR's pages, and can't say I always get his policy critiques, but I do not consider him to be virulently anti-Zionist. Jewish liberalism is not always sacrosanct, and has its own unpleasant equivocations which cause undo harm. Philip Roth exposes it however diffident or enthusiastic one might be about the author. I've certainly experienced it, and wrestled hard with my conscience afterwards, despite the roots of poison which have led me to eschew certain other vectors of radical equality.

Yet Billy Ray deserves credit for nibbling around the edges of the edifice we call the fourth estate, and Sarsgaard reached in deep to pull out an inspirational scene on the nature of integrity, despite the fact we have to find ways to entertain the audience, and do it daily. Everyone is in the brand game.