Tiago Mata

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David Lynch does a naturalist interview tour of America. It’s a 20 000 mile road trip, of 70 days, talking to people found on the road. The people telling their story. People. People. Tells David Lynch, discovering the wonder of oral history, that out there without a script the anonymous has a story, and knows how to tell it. The interviewers, Lynch’s wage laborers, ask a closed set of questions such as “What am I most proud of?” or “How would I like to be remembered?” The questions give the project some consistency, together with the editing of the clips, while the location on the map gives just enough context.

What comes out of these interviews however, besides a bit of life story, is the impossibility of questioning. The design that people’s lives can fit between the expectations of an early life that gets or doesn’t get realized, and the retrospective look (flashback, judgment day); fails. People have no emotions for these epic questions. They live life merely by living, never professing it.

It promises to “discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections.” It is Eu Profiler. My result puts me far to the left, and sitting on the fence about all things European (picture is me in the Portuguese “landscape”). The party in Europe I am closest to is the Piratpartiet of Sweden. And by reading their program online it seems a pretty nice match.

There is something unseemly about this survey. I makes political choices into an algorithm, of separable questions with individual weights. It makes party positions into discrete data points on a Cartesian axis. History personal and national is forgotten for the sake of the program. Charisma, trust, and imagination are not the axis. All that is exciting and humane about politics is expelled.

I won’t follow the advice and emigrate to Sweden to cast my vote. I doubt anyone will. Disciplinary projects like this, that want to shape reason and emotion are common. But their coming to existence doesn’t mean they are effective.

I hear Eric Alterman, blogger, professor, book author, in a podcast from the Woodrow Wilson School on the “The Future of News”. The session was roughly devoted to the economics of print, although very little of that go mentioned. There was on interesting passing remark by Alterman, that today’s media is mostly opinion, in loose paraphrase, to “provide context to the news.” News is everywhere, diffuse, instantaneous, and repeated in the print media, so the new journalist ventures mainly online focus on “context.”

Context is thrown back and forth in academic and semi-academic settings as a good thing. But the more it gets invoked the less I understand what it refers to.

I’ve been making notes on the media debates about the economic (formerly financial, and credit) crisis. My plan was to write down in notecards: themes, characters, positions, and narratives. Then cover a large table with the color coded cards. Shuffle them. And rearrange them in sequences and distances, taking photographs of each setting. With no pretension of making an art installation. This is my native, Ven diagram, way of thinking through the thematic patterns of popular discourse.

Regrettably I am too slow. My speed impairment is expressed in my street running, my pool swimming, my football striker instincts and my paper writing. Worse still, I don’t usually win games: chess, checkers, Go, Unreal Tournament, Fifa 07. Picking last week’s New Yorker I notice how I lost another race. I feel cheated, my notecards stacked mercilessly into one single paragraph.

Please take a deep breath, and read the following:

This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. (…) The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic, behavioral, legal, and political. Among the dozens of contributors and culprits, real or perceived, are the personal computer, the abandonment of the gold standard, the abandonment of Glass-Steagall, the end of fixed commissions, the rating agencies, mortgage-backed securities, securitization in general, credit derivatives, credit-default swaps, Wall Street partnerships going public, the League of Nations, Bretton Woods, Basel II, CNBC, the S.E.C., disintermediation, overcompensation, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Phil Gramm and Jim Leach, Alan Greenspan, black swans, red tape, deregulation, outdated regulation, lax enforcement, government pressure to lower lending standards, predatory lending, mark-to-market accounting, hedge funds, private-equity firms, modern finance theory, risk models, “quants,” corporate boards, the baby boomers, flat-screen televisions, and an indulgent, undereducated populace.

(Friends, family, and fans, worry not, I will pull through and have already a new paper idea: to expose the New Yorker as meta-journalism.)