Defense of Daisey

The title is meant to be a pun on Sir Philip Sydney's Defense of Poesy. I feel it best just to say that to get it across.

And not for the first time that day, she caught herself wondering whether crisis may be one of the climates where education flourishes—a climate that forces honesty out, breaks down the walls of what ought to be, and reveals what is, instead.

—May Sarton, The Small Room, page 138

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.

—Emily Dickinson

Part I—revision of a journal entry composed Monday, March 19

On Saturday while getting ready for work I heard a short bit of This American Life, but instead of listening I put on a record so I could listen to it in its entirety, from the beginning, the next day. An individual has certain standards for the comprehension of the truth of a thing, after all, and hearing the story from start to finish is one of the more traditional conditions. When I briefly heard Mike Daisey I thought they were replaying January's episode made up of an excerpt from Daisey's epic monologue The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs, followed by a brief discussion of the fact-checking steps taken by TAL. But then I heard Ira Glass allude to dishonesty. He was grilling Daisey on fabricating the story. I put the needle on Fauré's Sonata No.2 for Cello and Piano in G minor and, for the rest of the day, my imagination raced to its tune. What could be more earth-shattering than disproving a story that itself was earth-shattering? Is it then earth-restoring or earth-shattering to the second power? I would have to wait a day.

So Sunday, first on the agenda: listen to this story. I made my coffee, filled a bowl with granola and sat on the sofa with a notebook. I figured I would need to take notes.

I must say, I was slightly disappointed. To devote an entire episode to retraction, to ten-second awkward pauses, to outlining the difference between you-the-transparent-journalistic-institution and Mike-Daisey-the-liar, the lying ought to be pretty outrageous, even pathological. I did not see it that way. I happen to hold in common two things with Daisey: I tell stories based in fact, and I am not a journalist. So I could empathetically see him, like one with an embellished resumé, slipping further and deeper into a lie, honestly wanting to be the man for the job, but knowing he should have been a tad more realistic in describing himself. Ira Glass sees The Agony and the Ecstasy in a theater (which is now also unhappy that his show was labeled "non-fiction"), mistakes it as an exposé, and approaches Daisey with a job opportunity—adapt this story for a radio that, as it turns out, has more to do with journalism than art—and Daisey, as I certainly would, says Great, the truth of this story will reach more ears, the humanity of Chinese workers will impact more American consumers. The dozens of real people I met will be made more real to those who will only meet the products they construct or clean. This is important. This is good.

The journalistic treason into which he he has now infamously slipped, claimed him slowly and naturally. But it isn't just that he purposely kept TAL out of contact with his translator. It began in the moment he put his experience into words, while still in China—in phone calls, journal entries, moments digitally recorded. Each step in relating a story, in tying it with the greater story, and the greater sociopolitical story, and the greater human story, it is an amalgam of choosing details and leaving out others just as it is choosing one larger narrative as opposed to another—and that is true of any of the most objective journalism conceivably written. How this is done to create art, to create an emotionally impacting narrative that makes the listener rethink his relationship to humanity, or to inspire a change in society and appeal to the listener's ideals—this would have made very gripping radio: Mike Daisey's process versus the rigors of journalism. The subjectivity of truth and the divergent methods of its account. Ira Glass's angered, self-righteous—however justified the anger and self-righteousness may have been—and (ironically) subjective take on the situation did a disservice to the potential teachability of the moment. Instead it was awkward and often more reminiscent of moments in elementary school where I wait for one 6 year old to apologize to the other.

Perhaps I felt cheated—the 24 hours of build-up escalated the size of the Daisey lie-bomb. I thought it would be massive, not just that he imposed Aristotelian unities on the whole of his trip, that he fudged details to no greater extent than the non-fictive memoir of any TALalumnist. I found myself longing for days when the show took itself less seriously, when it epitomized the '90s search for the profound in the simple, when, if the squirrel broke one more invented item in the living room, or an invented line of dialogue is ascribed to a composite elf and not a real one, the modified detail was allowed in the creation of a better story.

Reading the journalistic outrage that night was truly humbling, just as dozens of hyper-journalistic TAL episodes have been in the last decade. All meaningful reporting insights given in Daisey's monologue have been present in news stories about China and its factories for years in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But I didn't know that! People who know what they were talking about, and have known what they have been talking about, said Daisey ultimately will hurt his cause more than he helped it with the attention he has brought to working conditions at Foxconn since January. It seems the media is taking satisfaction in regaining hold of the truth. The freelance artist does not possess it: he tells stories, he hints at the truth with make-believe. He in this moment is not relevant, but he may be later. But Daisey will not be. The media has decided this monologuist is finished.

My favorite act of a This American Life episode is a Dishwasher Pete story (Episode 56, "Name Change" 3-7-1997). His 'zine about washing dishes in every state is making mainstream ripples. He is invited to make an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. He does not want to go on TV. His friend does. The media doesn't know what DP looks like (there are no photos in his 'zine Dishwasher). So DP and his friend are flown to New York, treated to a glorious buffet, and DP's friend appears on the Late Show with David Letterman as Dishwasher Pete.

We revel in the individual's ability to subvert power—through creativity and playfulness we can use the breadth of someone else's media to further our own game on our own terms. This story is too small for anyone to care, and David Letterman does not have enough journalistic integrity for this coup to shake anything up. But it is symbolic of something important. For those of us with no voice and something to say it is like a myth, a beam of hope emitting from the cynical idiot box.

Daisey's deception is quite different, the stakes are much higher; and Ira Glass and his show have integrity. But does not a similar satisfaction still exist in this story, that one man can co-opt a powerful institution and direct its full force and attention toward truth and justice, even if it is done through deceit? There is no correct answer—this should be emphasized—but I believe anything that is, first, a massive movement to consider our role in global injustice and, second, a discussion of what is truth—this is good.

Consider the questions like this:

He is Dishwasher Pete and does not want to go on TV.

He is DP's friend and does want to go on TV.

They want DP on TV.

Who goes on—DP, DP's friend or nobody?

He has facts that tell a story already told in the Wall Street Journal, not emotionally captivating, that will not impact people in a meaningful way.

He has an emotionally captivating story that subjugates facts to this narrative that will impact people in a meaningful way.

What goes on—Artful journalism, journalistic art, neither.

I am glad Dishwasher Pete's friend went on the Late Show and that Mike Daisey "lied to lots of people" and that they found out—and I think you should be, too. The popular conscience is no longer captivated by authors like Upton Sinclair and Harriet Beecher Stowe, works that use an artful alchemy to transform truth and fiction into a more important truth, that push us forward as a society, or, in this case, inspire us to export our ideals with our money. Popular art—where our collective conscience lies—is not novels or poetry or theater. It is reality. It is This American Life, reality TV, documentaries, talk radio, and we can't pretend that entertaining reality is not staged, recontextualized, or that anyone's perception is objective—perception is subjective, it is translation, it is imperfect. We can't pretend that the creation of a story is not something to be played with, that a story can be created objectively, and that this is not a means of manipulating truth (and the listener), but of trying to be faithful to it (and us the listeners).

I write this and I think of the guards with the guns, and I do get uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable. Why invent that? But why should the invention of a detail be so viscerally repugnant? Perhaps the feeling of the scene as he perceived it came across better with that detail as he attempted retroactively to recreate the emotional landscape with words and images. Or is he just catering to a totalitarian cliché? I tried to go to sleep somewhat early Sunday night to wake up early to go to work Monday morning. I had too much coffee late in the day. I couldn't sleep. I read the blogs. I listened to Daisey's preface to his last performance that he posted on his blog. I tried to go back to sleep. I thought of Roland Barthes' saluting soldier in "Myth Today"—"myth is a form of politicized speech"....—was this just propaganda that I agreed with? Daisey reusing the archetypes that converted our popular consciousness into one that condemned harsh working conditions to achieve the same thing on a global scale? Is myth harmful if it is acknowledged as such?

I turned on the light, picked up from the side of my bed The Small Room by May Sarton, a book I had been reading off and on for a month. My coffee-fueled, 1 AM racing intellect inhaled page after page of the story, already well underway, of a young literature professor who discovers the prized protégée of the most respected professor had ripped off an obscure article in a moment of weakness, under too much pressure to perform beyond her capacity, and, our main character hypothesizes, a subconscious desire to sabotage herself. But why? What was she thinking? She was bright enough to write an original, insightful and incisive paper—why plagiarize? It was like Mike Daisey's self-sabotage in reverse. Why not just be honest, ask for help? Did he want to be caught?

Daisey was capable of making a journalistically viable version of his story for TAL, but he didn't want to confuse the veracity of the two, for the facts to fade away. So why didn't he? Was he worried the larger achievement, the narrative, tonal, thematic unity—the truth—would falter if the facts, the details at the bottom were repositioned? In other words, had the constructed, often fabricated story become more true than what "actually happened" during Mr. Daisey's trip to China?

Part II—revision of email composed Sunday night, March 25, to my former professor Pauls Toutonghi after a midweek Mike Daisey discussion

Pauls,

I feel conflicted in siding with Mike Daisey more than popular opinion and the mainstream media cares to (though your essay vindicated my gut feeling, as this Guardian article also does http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/19/mike-daisey-this-american-life-facts ). In my own writing I take diligent note of the details at the center of the real event. I tape record conversations—especially in the 4-month period I made radio documentaries in which I attempted to contextualize live audio as opposed to paraphrase and use the acrobatics of storytelling ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/h.a.m.l.e.t./id428653664 )—and I use, whenever possible, snippets of language that occur in social situations (in your class I wrote a story that contained the lyrics of the karaoke songs the characters sang and the content of an apostrophe or a monologue to a character in the story; the other adopted images from the spooky social installation of a haunted house).

And beyond an illogical reverence for the actual detail of an actual scene, I have a preoccupation with the situation that amounts to the account of the actual details and the actual scenes. Therefore the things I presently write and have written are determined in their form by the real life activity of writing them. The long short story about Ed that you helped me edit was pure journalism, using its only true imagination and invention in theorizing the meaning of the dynamic between Ed and myself, the object and subject interchangeable, together telling their story. The books about Seinfeld and bocce both make the meat of their narratives a hyper-conscious study and explication of a straight-forward, real life narrative, writing a book about a TV show and taking a trip and playing bocce ( http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/ and http://bocceballing.blogspot.com/ ). The weakness in my writing comes from the refusal to invent, from dialogue to details to generalizations about the personages involved.

What I hope to achieve is honesty—both an imaginative attempt to express a truth metaphorically, and an artful transparency about the real life mini-miracles that create the clarity of mind that create writing. But there is a limit, as we discussed w/r/t—and what is essential about—Daisey's situation; and we must invent, and language itself is a metaphorical representation—an invention—of the thing it describes. But what troubles me about what I wrote is that it resembles yours in moments, and there is a dishonesty in ignoring these resemblances. I revised what I initially wrote on Monday on the evening of Wednesday, after reading the draft you sent me Wednesday afternoon. Even the title "In Defense of Daisey" is the essence of mine, "Defense of Daisey," which I liked as an echo of Sir Philip Sydney's "Defense of Poesy," the century old justification of the strange blend of truth/history and fiction/invention that poetry is.

The logic of my attack on objectivity—

journalistic treason ... began in the moment he put his experience into words, while still in China—in phone calls, journal entries, digitally recorded thoughts. Each step in relating a story, in tying it with the rest of the story, and the greater sociopolitical story, and the greater human story, it is an amalgam of choosing details and leaving out others just as it is choosing one larger narrative as opposed to another—and that is true of any of the most objective journalism conceivably written.

—was certainly better expressed in your essay—

Any narrative, no matter how basic, is a false representation of reality. This is common sense proposition and not one that anybody would debate. You don’t have to be Husserl to understand that driving to work (that great American activity) is not the same as being told a story about driving to work.

And the Monday draft in my journal had different language at this part of the essay, not speaking as broadly about the act of telling a story.

I don't pretend to think that my writing is subject to the same rigors of academic essay writing, or that our essays exist in the same sphere of media; nor must I any longer worry about institutional punishment for plagiarism. I am expressing my opinion on a blog, in economic terms, as a hobby. Yet I have written this email, as this is all very important to me, more than the content of any of my economically validating occupations. And I have proposed an intellectual kinship between our essays, and an influence of yours on mine, and that, therefore, mine is dishonest if it does not acknowledge yours. Yet I don't pretend that mine interacts with the benevolent power structure that is online publishing as yours will, or that this transparency is even relevant.

The problem of writing amateurishly in a vacuum is that, even if I was on some sort of critical cutting edge, I would never know. Quality and power go hand in hand in terms of publishing. Is the discussion of Mike Daisey and Ira Glass any more interesting in the mirrored context of my concurrent reading of the May Sarton novel, and, in turn, does the coincidence that its content (the relationship between literature students and professors at a small liberal arts college) convinces me to email you for your opinion—and that you immediately respond with an email sent the night before at 1 in the morning—enrich our understanding of the subject at hand?

Does any of this strike you as legitimate literary discourse, or am I forever just a journaling student, or is that the best to which we may can aspire? And if my essay presently is not relevant or important beyond its relationship to my own amateur intellectual growth, how would I, speaking as a student, effectively acknowledge coming across your essay?

I wrote this email last night, a week after the sleepless Sunday night that first inspired the essay in question, and have edited it roughly today. I realize it is neither fair to pose several of these ridiculous questions to you much less occupy so much of what should be your free time with school-related issues. I have to take the 1st grade class to recess now (we have computer lab time).

Underslept,

Andrew