I Report, I Decide Archives
I will take nails,
long nails
and hammer them into my body.
Very very gently,
very very slowly,
so it will last longer.
I will draw up a precise plan.
I will upholster myself every day
say two square inches for instance.
Then I will set fire to everything.
It will burn for a long time.
It will burn for seven days.
Only the nails will remain,
all welded together and rusty.
So I will remain.
So I will survive everything.
- Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, 1962
“No Elvis. No aliens. No UFOs.” What’s the point?
(UPDATE: Original link is dead. This story is what I was talking about.)
I’ve been doing reporting long enough that I know laughing while interviewing someone is usually not a good idea. It was still difficult to keep a straight face while speaking with a young protester yesterday who said he traveled around the country demonstrating because he was an “anarcho-syndicalist.”
Not that he or his views were funny. It was just that as he expounded them, in the back of my mind a guy with an English accent, straining to be heard over the sound of clapping coconuts, delivered the same spiel:
“We don’t have a lord. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune … Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out swords … that’s no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
Regardless, you have to give some sort of grudging respect, if just for consistency, to a guy with a button reading not only “feed the poor” but also “starve the rich.”
Damn bureaucracy! Evil one world government! All I want is a freakin’ press pass — with some 2,500 journos already accredited, one more’s going to make that much of a difference? At least I’m not the only one …
“And last weekend, as he lay connected to an oxygen tank in his Miami Beach home, he phoned The Associated Press with a story idea.” Rest in peace, Mr. Sosin.