Hubert Humphrey, for instance: I don’t mind admitting that I think sheep-dip is the only cure for everything Humphrey stands for. I consider him not only a living, babbling insult to the presumed intelligence of the electorate, but also a personally painful mockery of the idea that Americans can learn from history.
But if Hubert meets a crowd in Tampa and 77 ranking business leaders offer him $1000 each for his campaign, I will write that scene exactly as it happened—regardless of the immense depression it would plunge me into.
No doubt I would look around for any valid word or odd touches that might match the scene to my bias. If any of those 77 contributors were wearing spats or monocles I would take care to mention it. I would probably follow some of them outside to see if they had “America—Love it or Leave it” bumper stickers on their cars. And if they did I would definitely make note of it. If one of them grabbed a hummingbird out of the air and bit its head off, I think it’s safe to say I would probably use that . . .
. . . but even if I did all that ugly stuff, and if the compilation of my selected evidence might pursuade a reader here and there to think that Humphrey was drawing his Florida support from a cabal of senile fascists . . .well . . . I probably wouldn’t get much argument from any of the “objective” journalists on the tour, because even the ones who would flatly disagree with my interpretation of what happened would be extremely reluctant to argue that theirs or anyone else’s was the flat objective truth.
You won’t find many working reporters defending the concept of Pure Objectivity. They know better. The only zealous defenders of “objective” reporting are the Editors, Publishers and other diminished-capacity “news executives” who frequent National Journalism Conventions. Or semi-retired “commentators” like [CBS news analyst] Eric Sevareid, who have grown so far away from the sweaty midnight realities of politics that they might as well be looking down from some germ-free eiyre (sp) [aerie] in the Vatican, like the Pope or maybe Howard Hughes. Which is not to say they might not be Right from time to time. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. But it is a little hard on the senses to live thru a decade of getting the News from [NBC anchor] Chet Huntley, and then suddenly find him grinning out of the tube at you and spinning a salespitch for American Airlines.
On the other hand, it’s also true that I will blow a fact here and there. A month ago I wrote that a registered independent in Colorado could vote in either the GOP or Democratic primary—which was true last year, but the law was recently changed. Somebody wrote to curse me for that one, and all I can do is apologize. In 1970 I knew every clause, twist, sub-section & constitutional precedent that had anything to do with voter-eligibility laws in Colorado. (When you run for office on the Freak Power ticket, the first thing you do is learn all the laws.) But when I moved to Washington and got into the Presidential Campaign I stopped keeping track of things like that.
Voter-eligibility laws are changing so fast all over the country this year that in many cases not even the city/county clerks and official registrars in charge of dealing with new voters really know who is eligible. Just because somebody tells you that you’re not eligible to vote doesn’t mean you aren’t. During the Freak Power election in Aspen the county clerk formally and officially disqualified 88 out of 450 new voters. We took them all to court and won 87 out of 88 cases in six hours.
The only other serious error that I feel any need to explain or deal with at this time has to do with a statement about Nixon. What I wrote was: “There is still no doubt in my mind that he could never pass for human . . .”
But somebody cut the word “never.” El Ropo denies it, but our relationship has never been the same. He says the printer did it. Which is understandable, I guess; it’s a fairly heavy statement either way.
Is Nixon “human”? Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. There is no real argument about that. Most juries would accept, prima facie, the idea that the President of the United States is a mammal.
He is surely not an Insect; and not of the lizard family. But “human” is something else. A mammal is not necessarily human. Rodents are mammals. An extremely intelligent Bayou Rat called “Honeyrunner” was once elected to the city council in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Nobody called him “human,” but they say he did okay on the job.
It would take a really sick and traitorous mind to compare the President of the United States to a Bayou Rat, regardless of intelligence. So maybe El Ropo was right. By almost any standard of responsible journalism the President must be referred to as “human.” It is one of those ugly realities—like the Amnesty Question—that we will all have to face & accept.