I have told stories for money for fifteen years. One of the most important things about storytelling is how you tell the story. The news makes that part simple. You lead with the top story.
Last night I watched ABC World News Tonight with David Muir. WORLD news. The first story they told me was about Selma Blair.
Selma Blair was in Legally Blonde. She played Charlie Sheen’s therapist on Anger Management. This was, what ABC chose as the main event yesterday for the entire globe.
The news said Selma Blair had a breakdown on a plane on Sunday and went after the crew. She had no weapon, but her body. which has multiple sclerosis, she told all of us that about eight years ago.
That was number one on Earth. The biggest story on the internet all weekend was Shane Gillis, and the WORLD news did not say his name once.
On Saturday night Shane Gillis stood on NBC and said women at the gym dress like whores. This was not a joke, it was bait. A joke has a structure. Whore is a noun.
He said it about half the planet, live from New York. Women go to the gym. Every woman who went to the gym on Sunday morning walked in thinking about the whore Shane Gillis meant.
James Talarico is running for Senate in Texas and he got the flu. The president renamed him TalaFREAKo and asked the country what was really wrong with him. By the weekend half the internet had TalaFREAKo in a mental hospital.
It went like this. Talarico stopped campaigning at the end of September. Last week the president posted that TalaFREAKo was missing, that twelve days was a long time for a flu, and that something else must be going on. That was bait. He was telling the country that a man who might become a senator might be mentally ill.
The country took the bait. Two men called a psychiatric hospital in Ohio. They recorded a woman on the phone who seemed to say a James Talarico had just been discharged, and they posted the tape. The president supplied the nickname and the country supplied the diagnosis.
Talarico came back and said it was the flu. His campaign called the tape a lie. What he never said is that a psychiatric hospital would not make him one inch less of a candidate. He never asked why the president of the United States was using mental illness as a weapon. Even the man it was aimed at agreed that sick in the head is the worst thing you can be.
A comedian said whore and a president said TalaFREAKo. The winner was a crazy woman.
I learned two things from that broadcast. Health is a weapon in this country. Being a woman is a demotion.
The planet can be burning, with wars and famines and bodies in every time zone. America will still sit you down at dinner and tell you the biggest thing that happened anywhere was a woman losing her mind on an airplane. And she was probably a whore anyway.
