Is this tiny sector booming on the strength of the number of transvestites moving into the neighborhood?A journalist has to keep his eyes open, observe everything. A friend of mine has a theory about television news -- the most interesting stories are in the little snippets that run on the ticker, not in what the presenter is talking about. I wasn’t sure of that, partly because I don’t like to read those flashing banners. They are equivalent to the producers admitting that this news segment may not be fully engaging your attention, so try thinking about this at the same time to keep your brain busy.
To test it out, I turned on Bloomberg TV, a particularly vile specimen of information overloading. The lower right side of the screen told me that the South African market was trading sideways, that the yen/euro exchange rate was so and so… plus they had a real ticker tape running across with New York Stock Exchange quotes, in alphabetic order.
Then on the left I saw another headline: “Wild Alice Roosevelt Was Famous Wit, Dad’s Decoy.” I have to say this was on Sunday, usually a slow news day in business or any other journalism. But is the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt really news, under any circumstances?
My laptop sat on the table right next to me, so I went online and found the story, which began, “She smoked, smuggled whiskey in white gloves and took potshots with her revolver from the back of a speeding train.” Sounds wild, all right.
The story by Lewis Lapham said he had interviewed James Bradley, author of “The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War,” a book about the diplomatic mission that President Roosevelt sent to Asia in 1905 and for which Alice acted as hostess. My first thought was for the author: What a curious little corner of history you have bedded down in.
At the very bottom of the Web page the editors explained that Lapham hosts “The World in Time” interview series for Bloomberg News. So the whole thing was nothing but a promo spot, a teaser. Oddly enough, the Web page had active links to Lapham’s magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, to the man himself, to the author and his book, but none to the show being promoted.
The choice of using that book to highlight an interview show struck me as curious, for a few reviews led me to perceive it as an uneven work, a blanket indictment of Teddy Roosevelt and all acts of American imperialism following the Spanish-American War. The author brings his condemnation of US foreign policy full circle there, for a hundred years before the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, some Americans were condemning US soldiers’ use of water-boarding against Filipino insurgents.
Bradley’s father was one of the soldiers who put up the flag on Iwo Jima in World War II. The younger Bradley wrote about it in “Flags of Our Fathers” and resents Teddy Roosevelt for laying the groundwork for Japan’s militancy and later attack on Pearl Harbor by giving the Japanese a free hand in Korea in exchange for leaving Hawaii and the Philippines alone.
William James wrote of the move to empire that he was astounded how America could puke up its ancient soul in five minutes… but all Bradley can do is whimper. He takes political correctness to extremes in that he strives too hard to be a contemporary liberal, seeing nothing but greed and stupidity in US foreign policy.
Considering the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs vote on the Armenian issue, maybe he’s got a point. But Bradley goes too far in condemning Teddy Roosevelt and all his works. After all, didn’t the man father the wild Alice?
As a Washington hostess, Alice had a needlepoint pillow on her couch that read, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” And I wonder, what would Alice say about these new wig shops on Tarlabaşı Boulevard?
