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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 18, 2005
Angelina Jolie
Every once in a while I do an Internet sweep through various "tabloid" websites, to find out what's going on. Not in politics, diplomacy, or war -- though even to those subjects, the "index" sites, such as Drudge Report in the U.S. and Nealenews in Canada, provide interesting pointers.The contemporary newspaper, and the news websites spawned from them, still observe certain formalities, such as putting breaking news of presumed importance on the front of the package, and making nominal distinctions between "reporting" and "commentary". The "tabloid" approach -- whether on newsprint, television, web or any medium -- is to take you, much less formally, into the heart of the sunrise, where the light is too intense to distinguish moral objects. Though it is perhaps unwise to admit, without my little tabloid sweeps I might have no idea what is going on, i.e. in the popular culture. I don't own a television -- was bored nearly to tears and violence when stuck watching one in a hospital waiting room recently -- and don't go to movies. Not having a car, I miss radio, too. I see billboards, and things happening in the street, overhear the lyrics of rap songs, etc., but without regular briefings on the signification of the proper nouns, the joke could be lost on me. And since I ride an elevator eleven floors up to my apartment, the thought sometimes occurs: Perhaps I live in an ivory tower. "Plague-Infected Mice Missing From N.J. Lab." Okay, that was from a regular news site -- a story I can tell you nothing more about. But I selected it to give some idea of that "interesting if true" response one gets. The tabloid news seems always to carry the possibility of extrapolation into something that must bring an end to the world. Turning now to The National Ledger, I learned this week that 27 percent of 1,639 women polled online by StrategyOne "would most like to be like Angelina Jolie in the bedroom". I'm not going to play coy with you. I do know who Angelina Jolie is, even in relation to Brad Pitt. I never wanted to know, but I know. So it was not necessary for me to Google-search for "Angelina Jolie". Still, the revelation came in the same way as the one about those plague-infected mice. I found it raised more questions than it answered. Perhaps I am obtuse, but it strikes me a sceptic must ask, "How would 27 percent of women know what Angelina Jolie's like in a place like that?" I mean, even I don't know, and I'm a man; and maybe Brad Pitt doesn't know, either. In another of my tabloid trawls, I had encountered the provocative suggestion that Ms Jolie "swings both ways". But is it possible that, at the minimum, she has had intimate relations with 27 percent of the female population? Alternatively, as a person with political interests, I might note a certain fallibility in the art of polling. And here I am thinking less about the danger of unrepresentative sampling, than of irregularities in polling questions themselves. You ask huge numbers of people to reply to a question that is intrinsically absurd, on a subject they can know nothing about. You do not thereby ascertain a truth, nor establish a fact. It is almost like creating an effect without a cause, for the result might conceivably hurt somebody. But whether it does or not, we are left somehow pregnant without issue. It would seem, from my casual electronic forays, that the popular mind has been loaded with such ethereal monsters. And the male and female mind alike (plus any other minds you care to mention) are positively weighted down by weightless beings. Angelina Jolie being just such a monster. I say this without prejudice to her, should she happen to exist. (I have plausible reasons for doubting this, but we'll leave those for today.) For all I know, the original bearer of that identity may be a cloistered nun. But the image transacted in the world, is of a creature who is not human. And therefore cannot be a woman, either. This leads to ontological confusions, such as the one presented to me the week before last, when a girl perhaps 17 years of age, emerging from the yard of a public high school, asked if I had "an extra cigarette". No problem with that. The problem was that this girl appeared to believe that she was Angelina Jolie. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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