YOU'VE GOT TO FIGURE...

Sometimes you read things in the news or hear them on TV, noteworthy events or pieces of information that pique your interest but don't give you the whole story. Then you've go to do some assuming about the situation, or guessing what the whole deal is really all about. Take that presidential election in Iran the other day, where they tell us 46 million people voted by hand-written ballot. Then just a few hours after the polls closed they announced the winner, the angry little guy with the leisure suits, by a huge margin. Which makes no difference to anybody who doesn't live there, or even the people who do since the President of Iran has a boss called The Supreme Leader who's the real boss of all bosses in that country. What was puzzling, though, is how fast they announced the results. You've got to figure that those Iranian election officials are the fastest counters of little slips of paper that ever lived. That's a pretty impressive feat of counting. Or a fraud.

Then you read about how President Obama swears up and down to the world that "America does not torture" and you say to yourself: fine, good, it's about time we knocked off that Gestapo bullshit, it's downright un-American, cruel and unusual punishment and all that. And so you get the impression that the crazy policies of former American Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney are being dismantled and you breathe a sigh of relief. You're thinking that if we don't torture our prisoners, maybe others won't torture American soldiers when they get captured. Then a few days later you read that America is identifying terror suspects but not arresting them ourselves, but instead fingering them so other countries get to arrest them, countries that do torture. So you've got to figure that this new president is full of shit when he says we don't torture. Then you've got to start guessing what he really means when he says anything about anything else and the relief you were feeling starts to evaporate into that same-old, same-old fooled us again mode. Dang!

Now you start remembering a lot of things the new president said, about there being a new day in America, where everyone's voice is valued and everyone's rights are respected. Then you read where he's on board with denying 5% of Americans the right to marry the person they love. He came out in favor of some lame-ass "Civil Union" for gay people, a separate but equal deal if ever there was one, the same rotten lie offered to black people for the 102 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that did away with all that bullshit. Now you've got to figure that this Obama guy has his head up his ass on this issue and you have to guess what else he's dead wrong about. And you maybe wonder if we've got ourselves A Supreme Leader who's the boss of the President lurking in the shadows somewhere like Shotgun Dick used to do.

It's hard to get the whole story these days. News you read on the internet is abridged, like every story is a synopsis of itself tailored to attention-challenged fools. Newspapers are hurting for business and laying off workers, so you've got to figure they are firing their most experienced and responsible reporters, the ones who went to journalism school and can maintain a cogent thought for more than a couple of paragraphs and follow a story to its end. And when was the last time a reporter nailed a president at a press conference with a hard and serious question? You can understand them laying off Bush The Younger since he was a complete dunce who spoke only gibberish, but the new guy is really smart, so why not see how well he can handle a wicked curve ball? You've got to figure that the trend in reporting is to write the story you want to write, not the actual one that is occurring. Which is not reporting at all, it is writing fiction. So now we're stuck guessing at what's going on and figuring we've been screwed again by people not doing the job they are assigned to do. Dang!

There's lots of things you read where you've got to read between the lines for what's really being said - poems, novels, politician's policy statements and other creative writing. It's a good exercise of our interpretive skills, but reading the news should not be one of them. The whole story should be in the lines, factual, clear and unambiguous, a cold recounting of what went on, who did what and what was said by whom. The only exceptions in news outlets are opinion pieces, and those are clearly labeled as such, the columns, the editorials and the commentaries. Reading the news should not leave us having to figure and guess and wonder.

How would you like your doctor to be so ambiguous with telling you the results of your medical examination? That's not an appropriate time for ambiguity and leaving important things out. Maybe some of our journalists need to go to a doctor that tells a story the way they do. After a few of them get really sick or really dead from the lack of information, maybe the rest of them will wake up and realize that they are not telling the whole story, the only thing they were hired to do in the first place. Creative writing and journalism are two very different disciplines. If we want to know what's going on, we read the news. If we want to enjoy a good read, we'll pick up a good book or click on bobcrespo.com.