Trees Died for These Sins

Yuletime

During a season blessed with such saccharin tidbits as the Globe's heartwarming stories about people who've sent in $25 to the Globe Santa every year since 1908 and the Times's heartwrenching neediest cases stories, it was nice for us cynics in the audience to come across the Real Paper's "Real Santa" and his "Greediest Cases" list.

As Mark Zanger, who wrote the Real Paper article, pointed out, there wouldn't be any neediest cases at all if the greediest cases didn't hog everything. So the Realp piece wasn't really cynical--just showing the other side of the story.

Not every paper in Cambridge was quite so willing to look behind the tinsel, though. The Cambridge Chronicle found the all-time alleged news story for its December 22 lead story: "Christ's Birth is Celebrated; Churches Offer Prayers, Singing." People may complain about consumerism replacing the religion in Christmas, but somehow this doesn't seem the way to put the religion back in.

Conspiracy Theories

Recent revelations about the extent to which the CIA has controlled foreign press and correspondents has led us to wonder whether there is really a world out there at all. Since most American correspondents overseas rely for their information on a) the CIA, and b) foreign newspapers, and since the CIA seems to have owned a fair number of papers overseas, isn't it possible that nothing you think has happened overseas really has? Perhaps it was all made up by some megalomaniacal CIA official sitting in Washington.

This sounds paranoid even to our conspiracyridden brains, but think. Remember Tanya Bunke, the East German revolutionary who had a long affair with Che Guevara? The CIA made her what she is today, having almost entirely fabricated her role in history by feeding false stories about her to an American journalist. Poor Patty Hearst somehow got brainwashed twice.

Of course, what this latest series of revelations really does is open the U.S. up to totally new versions of historical events--complete revisionism. The CIA could now proceed to rewrite all kinds of foreign events: the war in Indochina, the Middle East, the coup in Chile, ad nauseum. And no one would ever know what really happened. After all, if the CIA could bribe the Nieman Foundation--as it did during the '50s, when it persuaded the then curator to accept a Japanese journalist then in the employ of the intelligence agency--it has probably been able to bribe just about anyone in the media.

But we do think it was in poor taste for the New York Times to reveal that C.L. Sulzberger had been cooperating with the CIA for years, one day, and have him write his farewell column the next. Surely they could have let the old boy go quietly. They'll never find another columnist so willing to reveal his luncheon partners after all. "As the Prime Minister said to me just the other day..."

Biopsies

Most suspense-filled question of January: How will Susan Sontag resolve her two-part series on "Illness as Metaphor" in January's New York Review of Books? So far, she has proved in exhausting detail that 19th century authors considered tuberculosis a romantic disease. Apparently, part two will show that modern authors do not consider cancer romantic. It all rather leads one to worry about Sontag's worldview: it is a bit morbid, after all, to describe the difference between the centuries in terms of fatal diseases.

Lists

Newspapers and magazines went wild with new year lists: the best/worst of the year before, and what to expect in the year to come. Very few lines are worth reading, we think--after all, does it really matter what any newspaper's three critics thought were the ten best restaurants? However, Vincent Canby in the Times actually used the forum to make a valid point: with all the talk about Star Wars and escapism, it's worth remembering that people's reaction to the Cowardly Lion didn't tell anyone much about World War I.

Ego Death

News from the world of Middle East music ("Iraq, Iran, and I'm learning very fluent Hebrew!"). If Anwar Sadat is chosen Man of the Year by Time, the newsweekly with its finger squarely up the nose of middle America, then perhaps Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner is a close second. The latest Rolling Stone contains its annual reader's poll--not surprisingly, Fleetwood Mac comes out on top--"Rumours" still goes platinum again every month. But perhaps the most interesting precious metals are passed out in the Platinum Turkey Awards, in the "What Ever Happened to Ego Death" Category, which cites, among others, Rod Stewart, Ken Russell, Reggie Jackson, and Lillian Hellmann.

And last but not least, the Rolling Stone 10th Anniversary Television Special. Taking a look at that tube folly, along with the 19th anniversary issue, reminds one that if printed journalism is indeed dying, the mode of death will be falling into a Beverly Hills swimming pool and drowning, intrigued with its own chubby reflection. Other than that, from all this self-aggrandizement we have learned only that nobody can write the way Hunter Thompson did, not even Hunter Thompson.

Nihilism

And at last the long-awaitied winners in the Dr. Pressclips Meaningless Journalism Contest for December. First place goes to the Boston Herald for itspicture of a teenager grinning into the camera with a snow shovel in his hand. The cutline reads, "Twelve year old (Name withheld) shows no sign of birth defects as he shovels snow outside his parents home in Mattapan." Attaboy, kid. Second place to the New York Post for its "Sam Sleeps" cover, complete with a photograph of David Berkowitz catching a few z's in the Tombs. Honorable mentions toonumerous to name... --Joseph W. Dalton and Gay W. Seidman