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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 21, 2003
Year in review
I am not one of those journalists who keeps a little handlist or folder of major events so that he may write a "year in review" column as Christmas approaches. Every metropolitan daily has at least one such clown or used to before the invention of the Internet. Shortly after obtaining my first newspaper job many long years ago I was caught in the act of writing what must have looked like such a "year in review" column and thus mistaken for such a clown. A passing editor asked to see my clipping file -- curious I think to compare my inventory of events with his own. "Don't have one I said. Winging this as I go along." "You are doing WHAT?" the humourless wretch then asked me. Well well how does one explain? It seemed to me then as it seems to me now that notes can never save us. One makes notes when one is assimilating information and it may be wise to review them. But they are useless and a distraction when it comes to expounding an idea or telling the story. Nothing against a crackerjack chronology but the shape of a narrative is something that forms not on a list but in a head. One may only write from what one has in fact already assimilated. My argument against year-in-review articles is not a tyrannical one. If they help to sell newspapers I will not stand in their way. But when a journalist plays historian -- as I frequently do myself -- he is almost invariably making a spectacle. It is a forest-and-trees sort of thing; for no matter how clever we think we are we are too close to our notes too close to the events themselves to grasp the shape of a history. The utility of newspapers is for reporting news possible news rumours of news plus the usual package of unstrenuous entertainment. They are printed on paper that is notoriously disposable or increasingly scattered on the electronic wind. If the reader of such a publication depends upon it to form his whole view of the world he is in trouble. If he reads five newspapers daily to this end he is in approximately five times as much trouble. Which is not to speak against the wonderful institution which provides me with a tenuous living. News or more precisely the timely delivery of news is of inestimable value. One needs news to appear informed as we were reminded last week. The person who went to church last Sunday without first checking the radio would have looked a fool in the coffee clatch afterwards. On the other hand a knowledge of the fate of Saddam Hussein would have been no use to him at Mass. It would be good if editors only employed persons with a profound knowledge of the topics on which they write necessarily including some sound sense of their history -- but it would also be unreasonable. The number of people who actually have the fondest clue about what is going on around them is I am convinced very small. It is much smaller than the number who require employment if everyone is to eat. Even the best newspaper on the planet -- which I believe may still be the beautifully grey stodgy Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung -- regularly prints articles which appear to be rubbish. (If my German hadn't evaporated I would be more certain.) That is in the nature of the beast -- the beast of "information" -- and it is pointless to rail against it (as I often rail). While it is true that many if not most journalists are deeply biased and opinionated and that we allow this to cloud our view even of what is right before our eyes the worse problem is that we are so thick. The first condition is theoretically curable through learning and experience; the second cannot be cured. And I am thinking of specialists just now -- journalists with a "beat" of some sort even if it is as broad as the "war on terror" with which I struggle on weekdays. To turn not merely to some minor or restricted field but to the world at large and write this is what happened in the year of grace 2003 is thus quite absurd. Even correct information about the major events is unlikely to be available for decades to come -- in dark matters of war and peace there are secrets and secrets about the secrets -- by which time who will care? It is instead what no newspaper will tell us that is most important in any year. Or perhaps does tell us but only between the lines. "From dust ye were made and to dust ye shall return" is for instance not a breaking news story. But a day seldom passes in which this important idea is not copiously illustrated in every newspaper around the globe. To abstract what is important in the face of what is merely complex requires an act of genius bordering on clairvoyance -- though rising from a groundwork of common sense. It is a rare quality though if people were better raised it might be better appreciated. Cleverness gets nowhere near to understanding for it plays with surface appearances alone and thus can look only backward. To see what is truly significant is to see however imperfectly what is to come. The obvious "big event" of 2003 -- the events leading to and through the invasion of Iraq capped with the capture of Saddam -- was probably not the most consequential. And the image of the year -- the fall of the dictator's statue in Baghdad -- is unlikely to have pointed the moral. My own extremely fallible intuition is that if anything this war and this image concealed the main event. To my mind the real story was in the opposition to this war and how it persisted and developed in Europe and North America even after Iraq had been liberated from its tyrant. That will be the "developing story" in 2004 and years to come -- how the West has turned against its own ideals and grows increasingly ashamed even of its own most obvious accomplishments. For all we know what we witnessed in 2003 was not the defeat of an Arab tyrant but the last prop snapping in the edifice of the West. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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