For those who don't follow the link, the post was about a weekend trip to Jeff's Pirates Cove, a southern bar/restaurant that features heavily in pirate iconography (strangely) and touristy knicknacks, at which my new reporter colleagues and a handful of off-islanders got drunk and merrily detailed Guam's many political and social foibles.
I wrote the piece, but rightly decided that chronicling the first bits of Guam's dirty laundry thrown my way for public consumption would likely not go over too well with my new employers.
Two and a half years later, and no longer in fear of being fired for lack of objectivity, or just generally talking shit about Guam -- although that was about half of our coverage on any given day -- I am revisiting the post.
What's interesting is how so many of my first impressions (or my first impressions based on the drunken cynical bluster of my colleagues) still hold relatively true.
But then, so much of that stuff I first heard came with the territory of reporting, and reporting on the stuff we report on, because that's what we report on.
My job was to see in finer and finer detail all the dysfunctional crap so broadly painted for me during my first few days on the island.
I ingested a whole bunch of it, and spewed it out. And I don't really remember much of it. And am not sure it's really worth remembering. It's all very fuzzy.
But there are other things about Guam that are much less fuzzy: walking my dogs on beaches, swimming at night, a few startling nights of bright stars, New Years' lanterns, sunset, lots of sunset, driving around the island in my beat-up car, or a beaten-up-more truck to go to different beaches. Jungle. Rain. Lots of rain.
On my last day on Guam, I wandered around Tumon Bay by myself, having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and looked at the blue water.
I felt like a tourist, and sort of was a tourist, for a day.
And all that stuff I had learned and carried around and ingested and fretted over was gone.
There was just blue.
So Guam might have been nice if you hadn't had to report on it and be faced daily with all its myriad dysfunctions. But wouldn't that be the case anywhere that you report daily? Reporters' jobs are to dig through the surface layer of shine or grime and find out what's really underneath. Occasionally that may reveal something surprisingly good, but most of the time it will be more and nastier grime. And grime really is all relative, so the nicer a place is, the higher the standards. Which means what lurks below the surface might seem pretty good to reporters and citizens in a grittier locale, but will still seem unacceptable by local standards. But it's uncovering and exposing unacceptable that makes journalism so important. That's why it's the "fourth estate"--and essential to a functional democracy.
ReplyDeleteBut I for one agree that the job of dredging up and exposing all that filth doesn't lend itself towards contentment and zen. Cynicism is the cost of journalism, perhaps.
Yeah, the thing is, I was trying to say that like, Guam isn't just all that crap, because you learn all that crap and think you're all savvy and world knowing, or at least, many of my colleagues did. And I did too -- because you find out all that stuff and it's hard to ignore.
ReplyDeleteBut then, also, that only goes so far. Like, a place is more than its dysfunctional parts.
I don't know that that came out -- I kept getting distracted and couldn't remember what I was writing about.