I finished reading the Gellhorn bio last night. Yesterday I googled its author, Caroline Moorehead, and what a lot of vicious comments about Gellhorn! People are really so mean-spirited.
Her personal life was colorful, and there's lots to disparage, for those who are so virtuous that THEY haven't made mistakes or treated others badly. Nevertheless, the strength of the bio, I think, is in showing her abiding commitment to writing about political injustice as it played out in the effects of wars on civilians and her constant outrage at the wrongs of the world. How depressing to think that writing about such things, bringing them to the consciousness of decent people, will make a difference, and then to find out, again and again, that it doesn't.
I've marked perhaps a dozen passages in which Moorehead writes about the intersection of fact and fiction and the problems with journalistic objectivity. I'm a post-structuralist (at least on this ground) so I don't believe that true objectivity is possible: all "truth" is partial and situated. I have never thought before of bringing in the post-structuralists for this - but it's possible. Donna Haraway would be the best, I think.
Speaking of objectivity, I don't think I've mentioned that I have a new part-time job: I'm the Research Assistant for my department's 10-year strategic plan. The problem with plans of this sort (and planning generally) is the tension between the ideas of the full group affected and the ideas of the "experts" writing the plan. In city planning, for example, the conventional wisdom is that public participation is critical; the plan should be a reflection of the ideas of the masses. But typically, "the masses" have ideas for the future that the planners consider impractical or unsound and those ideas get sort of discounted in the writing process. I hope that we will give credence to the ideas we collect from our "masses" in this plan, but I've already noticed that committee members preface questionable data with statements like "Well, I'm sure everyone would agree that..." So it remains to be see how "objective" this plan will be and how well it will reflect the collective esprits of the department.
Posted by otto0114 at June 4, 2004 08:44 AM