Editorial: All the views fit to print

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

By Matthew Irwin

All the views fit to print
Let’s get something straight: It is in fact all about me.
A recent online reader comment suggested that we get away from “abusing the ‘I,’” eliminate references to “the author” and “skip the self-aggrandizement.”
“For as much [you’d] like it to be about you,” he wrote, “it isn’t.”

Here at JH Weekly, we believe in individual thought, in recognizing the impossibility of objectivity, in smashing the affectation of journalistic detachment.
But we also believe in contradiction, in changing minds, in challenging our own ideas. “Man will err as long as he may try,” Mephistopheles said, in Goethe’s Faust. And God replied, “Yeah, but he keeps trying.”

In my view, humanity is not aiming for a particular end, other than the completeness death offers individuals, but we are responsible in each generation to improve existence for all living things in the moments leading up to the final one, which we’ll each have to face alone with the good and evil we’ve put into the world.
So it goes that what hurts my brothers and sisters hurts me and visa versa.

Remember Alfie (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall: he said that he cannot enjoy himself, knowing that someone else somewhere might be suffering. The line is funny because it represents of a character flaw – Alfie justifying his perpetual melancholia.

How we act in public, or write in print, is somewhat different – in varying degree according to personality and profession – from how we exist in private. In some cases, we are better people; other times, we simply fulfill obligations of duty; still others, we become tough and cold in self-preservation. Worst perhaps is when we try to dance in a middle-realm of the least conflict, because, as a friend wrote to me of Jackson, “we penalize each other so much when our views clash.”

Each of these ways of being public is a little bit of a lie that informs the structure of our society. Walt Whitman believed that he shared his existence not only in body and spirit with all Americans, but also in mind – minds unhindered by the lie.
This paper appreciates the “I” and its repercussions in pursuit of a shared vision, a world without the lie, however futile the goal and erred the path.





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