Shameless Hussy Does a White Paper

"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.

Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.

Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?

Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.