Whole Life Times: Innocent Abroad

August 2005 | BackWords

Innocent Abroad

How Travel Knocked the Media Scales from My Eyes

by Jesse Kornbluth

Paris. We’ve been here almost a month. And, to state the obvious, it’s Different Here. Not necessarily better, just different. And the difference is dramatic enough to make me look at American media in a way I wouldn’t dare think of, much less write about, back home in the States. My scary perception: What the brighter bloggers suggest may be true—there’s no protein in mainstream media. If you want real food, you must wander to the odd corners of the web.

From afar, I’ve gobbled up a big supply of American media. That is, I’ve watched mainstream media fall on its pancaked face for most of the month we’ve been away—a period that started with the last gasps of Michael Jackson, rolled through Oprah Winfrey’s dust-up at Hermes, the yo-yo that is the Yankees and ended with Ed Klein on Hillary. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. But I did. And I am here to tell you; from a distance, American media looks grotesque, loud and overwrought—a lot of noise about very little.

Late on the evening of the full moon, my wife and I were pushing the kid in her stroller past the Eiffel Tower as—unknown to us—Tom and Katie were being whisked up to the Jules Verne restaurant. Their love vibration never reached us, but then, neither did the next day’s news conference. Or all the madness that followed. Paris just didn’t give a damn.

It’s amazing how quickly you can learn not to care about the mass culture of the homeland at a distance of 3,000 miles. Maybe it’s a function of any travel that has you disconnected from your mother country for weeks at a time, but from this dot on the planet, it just doesn’t seem that the United States really is the red-hot center of the world.

This is a conclusion that’s especially easy to reach in France. Its first manifestation came early in our visit, on a crystalline Sunday in the country. There we were, a picture out of a French movie: seven Americans—five of them longtime expatriates—and one Frenchman at a long table under the trees as our daughter chased the dogs.

You would expect that the new arrivals would be grilled about the Old Country. But the president never came up. There was no discussion of the war. The decline in American newspaper circulation and Hollywood box office elicited no interest. The topics were medieval cathedrals, the South Korean metric for serious wealth (your own art museum) and—because these people weren’t abject Francophiles—the million things wrong with French culture and government.

On the way back to town an idea started to form. These people hadn’t turned their backs on America; America had turned its back on the rest of the world. Not in so many words—the message was more like: “You can’t get anywhere without Uncle Sam.” And the rest of the world had noted this, absorbed it and decided to muddle on without us.

Or maybe it’s something else: American culture has stalled. “They” make movies we don’t want to see, publish books we don’t care to read, release music we can’t bear to hear. The answer to every American cultural question is “nothing applies,” because there is a schism between the government and the people. The government is crazy and—belatedly—most adult Americans seem to know it; the people have no power and the government knows it. Somewhere ahead we sense there’s a reckoning, which makes us uneasy if not outright terrified.

But that’s not a conversation we can have with one another, even though we think about hitting the wall about as much as we think about sex—the disconnect between the loons who make news and the rest of us is too great. If only we could have a do-over of the election! For that matter, if only the ball had bounced differently in 2000! How is it possible that a few misplaced votes here, an electronic glitch there, have us suddenly worried about... well, everything? So we do what we can: work and play. And those, too, aren’t as satisfying as they might be—our work is a desperate effort to store up nuts before the winter and our nights are evasive actions. Media that spoke honestly of this condition—media which grasps that the context of our lives is the most powerful content we’ve got—would be a sensation. But that would be, as it were, too French. That is, too much about feeling and perception and truths you can’t prove.

There are other diversions in Paris. Bookstores. It seems there are a million of them, many so tiny and specialized you don’t see how they make enough to feed the cat. And the cafés, where the French spend outrageous time just talking to one another. And the sidewalks dotted with beautiful women who don’t seem afraid of men, and with men who don’t seem afraid of women. And the child’s amusement park in the Bois, where we watched kids in bumper cars do something no American would think of—try to avoid collisions. Lots of sweet moments to fill the time that the Parisians don’t spend consuming media.

All trips end with resolutions. Mine is to spend a little less time reading about people I don’t care about and a bit more time being with people I do. And to be fearless about advancing what strikes me as the real topic media needs to explore: balancing coverage of scams and frauds and stunts with a sustained and sincere search for the light.

Jesse Kornbluth, founder and editor of HeadButler.com, has been a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair and Editorial Director of America Online. His e-mail: [click to e-mail].

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