"But I Digress ..." (9 page)

September 11

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 16 SEPTEMBER 2001

I
WAS WATCHING THE
cricket test match on Tuesday afternoon when a friend called and told me to turn on my television. “My television is already on. My television is always on,” I replied sternly. It doesn't do to have people questioning your work ethic.

“Turn to CNN,” said my friend, and there was something in her voice that caught my attention.

Soon I had forgotten the cricket. I watched, like the rest of the world, in whirling disbelief as scenes from Hollywood played out on my screen. It was all purest cinema, as though it were the alternate ending of a lost Bond movie in which 007 had somehow failed to foil the improbable and frankly impractical plot of the evil super-villain, who plans to paralyse the United States and panic the free world for inscrutable reasons of his own.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the footage was just how astonishing it was. It has long been the argument of old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud media critics, such as myself, that today's hyper-realistic special effects, in which anything that can be imagined can be made real, has the effect of gradually and progressively numbing the viewer to the experience of life outside the cinema. After you have seen a famous icon or national monument being destroyed on the big screen, as in movies such as
Deep Impact
and
Independence Da
y, I would have assumed that the emotional force of watching the same thing in real life would somehow have been diminished.

Nothing of the sort, as it turns out. In a peculiar way, it made the experience of seeing the towers of the World Trade Center disappear in a cloud of dust and rubble seem even more surreal, yet more difficult to comprehend. Your first reaction is to blink it away as a scene from a film, but when you rationally return to the fact that this scene, which can only have been from a film, is
not
in fact from a film, the disjuncture is even more baffling and boggling.

It is always instructive to watch the same news event unfolding on rival channels. Sky News (DStv) seemed to have the edge in efficiency, not only breaking information first (they had news of the Pittsburgh crash at least 30 minutes before CNN), but offering a wider range of snap opinions and specialist interviews. Those interviews also tended to be more helpful, while the CNN team seemed to be under instruction to ask each guest the question that should live in infamy: “As a New Yorker/American/member of the fire-fighting fraternity, how do the day's events make you feel?” Not surprisingly, the answer to that question remained fairly constant. No one was much pleased by the day's events.

CNN did have the edge, however, in the all-important story-headline department. While Sky opted to label its coverage: “Terror in America”, which was accurate enough though a little uninspired, CNN boldly declared: “America Under Attack”, which is altogether more snappy.

It was interesting to watch the coping strategies coming into play. At first the Americans hid behind a numbing wall of circumlocution. “If you listen carefully, in the background you can hear the sirens from the mobile anti-fire apparatuses,” intoned one reporter in Manhattan as a cavalcade of fire engines swept past.

“Here in the casualty ward there are many people dealing with issues relating to or stemming directly or indirectly from involuntary smoke inhalation,” declared a field reporter from St Vincent's hospital.

Soon, however, they were moved to displace their shock with anger, and the anger didn't take long to find its obvious target. Within hours we were being told that US intelligence sources were fingering “the Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden” as the culprit, a comforting source of speculation, given that US intelligence sources hadn't been able to give even the slightest prior warning that four hijacked passenger flights would shortly be used as weapons of terror.

Shortly thereafter, the channel managed to scrounge up footage of five or six happy Libyans dancing a jig, apparently celebrating the news of the attack on America. Even if one overlooks the questionable news value of watching a handful of foreign civilians in a hostile nation reacting for a TV camera, there didn't seem to be much in the handbook of responsible journalism to encourage cutting the footage with images of weeping New Yorkers and showing the montage on a repeating cycle all through the next day.

Far from America – though arguably not far enough – there was a peculiar and almost perverse pleasure in the communality of Tuesday evening. Wherever you went, groups of people were clustered around television sets in restaurants and bars, supermarkets and shop windows. Strangers at check-out tills started conversations about the fifth missing airliner; newspaper vendors at traffic lights asked me if I had heard any fresh news on my car radio. For an afternoon at least, people were drawn together by the sense of shared occasion, as we had been during the Gulf War, during the 1994 elections, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was an event we could all share, and something deep inside us thrilled to that.

“At least it gives us something to watch other than
Big Brother
,” said my friend on the phone, later that night, as we sat in different cities, unable to stop ourselves watching the same video footage being replayed for the umpteenth time. It was kind of funny, but neither of us felt like laughing. There are times, as TS Eliot nearly said, when humankind cannot bear very much reality television.

Not even St Helena offers safe haven

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 OCTOBER 2001

A
HOY, ME HEARTIES
. Avast and belay and thar, unless my eyes deceive me, she blows. Oops, you'll have to excuse me today. I am fresh back from the sea, the call of the running tide still ringing in my ears, the fine salt spray still blurring my eyes, a faint odour of harbours and seagulls still clinging to my clothing. I have been on the distant island of St Helena, as you would have noticed had you also been on St Helena.

St Helena is, I am told, as far away as you can get from any continental mainland without needing an oxygen pack and retrorockets. It is a remote place of rainforests and volcanic ridges, of shipwrecks and Georgian houses and a tree on which, if family legend be true, my grandfather once carved the initials of the woman who would become my grandmother, when he passed that way between the wars.

My grandfather was a little vague as to the precise whereabouts of that tree. He would puff contentedly on a pipe and say, “It was on a hill.” Perhaps that was his little joke. The whole of St Helena is a series of hills. It only stops being a hill when it briefly becomes a series of steep-sided valleys. I had promised – rashly, it now seems – to bring back a photograph of the initials. Could I find the tree? I could not.

Eventually I resorted to etching in the initials with a rusty nail. I cunningly carved them high on the trunk to take growth into account, but then I couldn't remember whether a tree trunk grows from the top or the bottom. I decided to carve another set of initials, and take another photograph, just to be safe, but as I was doing so a weather-worn local wearing a floppy hat and Wellington boots came tramping round the bend.

“Eee,” he said, or words to that effect. “You can't go carving on our trees.”

I blushed. “No, no, they're my grandmother's initials,” I reassured him. He looked at me with eyes that wished St Helena were a little further away from the mainland, and hurried away, no doubt to make sure his children were safely indoors.

The only way to reach St Helena is a five-day voyage on the RMS
St Helena
. I had gone to sea to take a break from television, but by the time I reached the island my eyes had been sufficiently soothed by the blues and whites of the wide-stretching ocean that I was ready for a little cathode action. They do have television on St Helena, and have had for a couple of years now, but when I arrived I soon realised that TV was a controversial subject.

“It will be the ruin of this island,” one old gent told me, casting eyes to the heavens. “You can see it already. The language of the children. And the clothes they wear. And how they cheek their parents.”

An elderly lady confirmed his forebodings. “Moral decay,” she told me. “Children see those gangsters on television, running around with guns. One of these days someone is going to bring a gun to the island, mark my words.” She leant closer and lowered her voice. “I shouldn't tell you this, as you write for newspapers, but last month my son left his wallet on the front seat of his car, and when he returned,” she paused for dramatic effect, “it had been stolen.”

I tried to work up some appropriate sympathy. “Window broken, eh?” I said, clucking.

She looked puzzled. “No, no,” she said, “they opened the door.”

I was curious to see what foul electronic outpourings could corrupt a community so pure no one locks their cars. What evil was being injected from across the waters? Porn channels? Snuff movies? I turned on the telly. It was M-Net.

It is disconcerting to venture more than a thousand nautical miles into the pitching blue, only to be confronted by a Currie Cup rugby match when you get to the other side. I watched the Currie Cup rugby match, of course – it is something like a conditioned reflex – but afterwards I felt ashamed.

That afternoon I walked up into the mountains and down into Daffodil Valley to find Napoleon's tomb – bare and slightly forlorn in the shade of the towering Norfolk pines – and I tried to stand there and think about Ozymandias and the fate of all things human, and how dreams and vaulting ambition must in the end turn to grass and suchlike improving thoughts, but all the while I couldn't shake the feeling that Marius Roberts or Gerry Rantseli was peering over my shoulder.

And then a terrible thought occurred to me. For the next four days as I made my way around the island, visiting the Boer War cemetery, swimming in the wild southern Atlantic, chasing tortoises around the gardens of the governor's mansion, I tried to ignore that thought. I tried to push it aside and to the back of my mind, but like a medieval witch or an unhappy childhood it kept resurfacing. The thought was simple, yet terrible: I wonder what is happening on
Big Brother
?

I resisted as long as I could, but like a souse returning to the bottle, one night I switched on. As I sat there in a funk of self-loathing, my neighbour popped round to borrow a cup of sugar. She glanced at the screen. “Oh that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Can you imagine that anyone would watch it? Eee, we all listen to the radio when that comes on.”

She left, and suddenly I felt bathed in the warm light of St Helena. Outside, folk were chatting over garden fences or washing their cars. No one was watching
Big Brother
. Oh blessed isle. Suddenly I understood why French emperors would come here to retire.

It takes a lot of money to look this cheap

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 18 NOVEMBER 2001

‘I
THINK THE EYES
are the windows of the soul,” said Tammy Faye, “so whenever one of my special friends dies I always ask if I can have their glasses.” It was one more reason not to be a special friend of Tammy Faye Bakker. The thought of her perched at the foot of my deathbed like a shoulder-padded homunculus, just waiting to put the pennies over my eyes and make off with my spectacles, is not one that encourages me to make a happy noise unto the Lord.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye
(M-Net, Monday, 10.15pm) was filled with noises unto the Lord. Some happy, others more like a strangled cry. Tammy Faye Bakker was the wife of Jim Bakker, the chipmunk-cheeked televangelist who first popularised religious television programming of the sort that revolves around saying “Hosanna” and asking the viewing public for cash donations.

Big Jim used many of those donations to build Heritage USA, the religious theme park that at one time was the third most popular tourist attraction in America. He also had a one-night stand with a Playboy bunny and was eventually jailed for misuse of subscriber funds.

Jim himself was interviewed, fresh from the penitentiary, posing with his new wife, wearing a Melton blazer and wire-rimmed spectacles and a swish new haircut. Prison does strange things to a man – in Jim Bakker's case, it made him resemble Glen Hicks. All the same, you can't hide those cheeks; he still looks as though he is concealing wads of hundred-dollar bills in his mouth.

The real focus was Tammy Faye, a Southern Baptist Zsa Zsa Gabor with facial make-up as thick as she is tall. “Tammy Faye was always religious,” said her brother. I think his name was Tommy Faye. “When she was little she had a wart on her finger and God told her to dip it in the Communion cup on Sunday. It worked.”

One more reason not to invite Tammy Faye around for drinks. I wouldn't care to lay on a punchbowl only for Tammy Faye to discover she has a carbuncle on her toe.

Jim and Tammy Faye's television empire had humble origins. We watched lurid 1970s footage of Tammy Faye operating a finger-puppet. As the Bakkers' Praise The Lord network expanded, she added another finger-puppet.

While Tammy Faye's fingers did the talking, Jim's principal task was to ask for money. I still can't get over his trademark sign-off. Just before the closing credits, he would look out at the audience and say, quivering with the effort of holding back a guffaw: “Jesus loves you, heh heh heh, he really does.”

Today, watching it, you think: “How did he get away with that?” True, audiences are no less gullible nowadays, but televangelists are thoughtful enough to wait until they are off-camera before they openly laugh at the rubes.

Whatever their other crimes, for me the Bakkers' greatest sin was the part they played in kick-starting the modern trend for turning private moments into public performance. No less than Oprah, Tammy Faye was one of the great TV weepers. She wept with sorrow, she wept with joy, she wept with her mind on something else and her eyes restlessly roaming round the studio.

When she became addicted to prescription drugs, she lived the recovery in the open, for the gratification of her electronic parishioners. When the financial brouhaha broke, Jim and Tammy Faye filmed their last show sitting on the porch of their mansion. “And now,” said Jim, “before we leave our home, Tammy Faye will sing ‘The Sun Will Shine Again'.” And she did. She did a lot of singing. Next to the finger-puppet, song was Tammy Faye's medium.

The show became a kind of winking, nudging celebration of Tammy Faye's post-Jim life. A walking trademark by virtue of her Crayola-box make-up and mascara that make her eyes look like two fields of sooty asparagus spears, she rose to cult status when she remarried, then waved her second husband goodbye as he in turn was jailed for embezzlement.

To lose one husband to the fraudsters' penitentiary is bad luck; to lose two is to become the butt of a nation's jokes. To become the butt of a nation's jokes is ultimately to find your way into their heart.

The documentary might have been a serious look at the American cash-for-redemption industry, or it might have been a serious examination of one woman's relationship with sudden wealth and a weird kind of showbiz, but in the end it was neither of these things. The show was narrated by RuPaul, a famous drag queen famous mainly for being famous. RuPaul was a dead giveaway – the show was not about a ruined televangelist's wife, it was about a Camp icon. We watched Tammy Faye at 60, having glamour portraits made and trying to pitch a puppet show to ponytailed young network executives. She was the very embodiment of the Camp female.

Exaggerated to the point of sexlessness, the Camp female is celebrated for being unaware precisely how she comes across to the world. Tammy Faye is so fabulously like a Bible-waving Dolly Parton drag act that you imagine she can't possibly not be doing that on purpose. But she isn't. Like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, she talks ironically about herself but can't actually see the irony. She is her eyelashes. The celebration of her Camp is the celebration of her inability to grasp precisely why it is that life is always slightly beyond her control.

The problem with Camp is that, by definition, it illuminates nothing beyond itself. Showbiz glamour is skin-deep, but Camp doesn't even get as deep as the skin. It is as deep as the last layer of cosmetics. The documentary was contemporary irony at its most empty. It posed knowingly, but it had nothing to say. Tammy Faye wasn't a woman, she was just a cultural reference. Not even a televangelist's wife deserves that.