JUST THE FACTS

Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers, and with an Introduction by Louis Menand (New York: New York Review Books, 2011) (From "The Triumph of The Fact": "It is their respect for The Facts that makes most Americans so touchingly willing to give information to anyone who asks them for it.  We take easily to being profiled, galluped, kinseyed, luced, and otherwise made the object of journalistic or scientific curiosity.  With amazing docility, we tell the voice on the phone what TV program we are looking at (so that advertisers can plan their strategy for exacting $$$ from us) [blogger note: now we are facebooked, googleed, amazoned, etc., for it is through  and over the internet that we so readily disclosed the our personal facts], answer impertinent questions from reporters (whose papers then sell the answers back to us), co-operate on elaborate and boring questionnaires administered by sociologists (so they can get their, not our, associate professorships), and voluntarily appear as stooges on broadcast shows which bare the most intimate details of our lives or--if we miss out on a Fact question--put us through stunts as if we were laboratory animals in the  grip of a made scientist.  In the last instance there is, of course, 'something in it' for us, but the prizes seem not worth the humiliation, and I suspect are often more of an excuse than a motive, i.e., that the participant thinks of himself objectively--as an object, a Fact--and not subjectively--in value-terms like pride, honor, or even vanity--and so either welcomes or doesn't mind the public exposure of his Factuality; but that senses there is something monstrous in this detachment and is glad to conceal it by affecting greed, a base motive but at least a subjective one."  "In the thirty years I have been asking people questions as a journalist, I have often wondered why almost no one refuses to give an interview, even though, in many cases, there is more to be lost than gained by so doing.  There are some obvious reasons for this--vanity, the American illusion that publicity is always in some vague way to one's advantage, and the pleasure most people take in hearing themselves talk, especially when the listener is professionally sympathetic and informed.  A less obvious reason perhaps is that the gathering of facts by journalists has come to be accepted as a normal and indeed praiseworthy practice, and people seem to feel it their duty to 'co-operate.'  If the story is about themselves, they take the line they 'have nothing to hide,' they 'stand on the record,' and insist they 'just want to give you the facts and let you decide.'  In reality, they often have plenty to hide, but it would be a cynical and untypical American who would admit this even to himself."  Id. at 203-235, 215-216.  This blogger is a very cynical American (I would say "untypical American" as well, but that would be an effort to make myself into something exceptional and special).  Oops! Perhaps I should have hid those facts.).