(FB 1544812047 Timestamp)
—“What is the story with your father and the council?”– Steven Jackson
I don’t have a lot good to say about my father but he was smart, worked very hard, and would never lie ever. (He’d come very close to killing you for even suggesting it.)
I used to go to town council meetings and learn how ‘government was done’. Stupid shit like ‘this sidewalk is expensive’. Ordinary stuff.
The newspaper would regularly twist his words out of context in order to imply the direct opposite of what he said.
I have vivid memories of lying on the carpet in the living room reading the newspaper saying “I was there. That is not what happened.” And my father saying “news is a best nothing but fictional entertainment, and at worst nothing but lies. Never believe a word they say”.
So I get into college and it’s a saturday and I’m wearing faded jeans with holes in them, and a faded blue chamois shirt, and white sneakers, and walking around campus because I did too much writing already and need a break. It’s a rainy day. i walk into the student union, and someone has sponsored this absurd pinball machine where the ball is the size of a softball. So I walk up to this thing and put a quarter in it and try it.
Out of nowhere the local news crew comes up and asks if they can film me. I am not and never have been someone who likes public attention, but I said yes. The women then proceeded to start a dozen takes trying to get me to say that I had nothing better to do than play pinball in university. And so I finally said – I’m not going to make a fool of myself. I told you already, that I’m taking a walk because I’ve done too much work already, and this is just something interesting because it’s new.” They aired some choppy thing without me responding that she suggested the same nonsense.
I was walking down the street in west hartford just after I had purchased a local business. Some reporter stopped me for one of those 60 second sets of questions. They tried multiple times to force me to say other than what I’d said: that the problem was that hartford had imported too many black families and that the north end in particular was a no-go zone even for the FBI. (This was common knowledge). They did not air my statement.
I give press releases all the time. Between the inflation by the marketers, the PR firm, and the press you’d think I claimed I went to Harvard and invented the light bulb.
I stopped giving interviews to the press because you simply can’t trust them to get anything right that doesn’t fit their institutional narrative.
Every journalist is a professional gossip and nothing more. The same is true for every social scientists, and everyone in the non-stem academy.
And you wonder why I want to legislate TRUTH? That’s why.