So, what’s up with starting columns with questions, the kind that, prefaced with a mutated bimbo conjunction, beg Dear Reader to cock his head to one side, hang an index finger from the corner of his mouth, and shrug exasperatedly? What did bad columnists do for introductions before Jerry Seinfeld made it okay to flaunt the banal?
And is it just me or has it become a standard journalistic device to ask ‘Is it just me —?” when one is about to point out universally recognised phenomena? I mean, is it just me or do a lot of bears go potty in the woods these days?
Still, at least the emaciated ponytail-tossing brigade, teetering from one literary eating disorder to another on journalistic premises as thin as the stems of their Manolo Blahniks, don’t pretend to be anything other than vapid. At least they’re not trying to be, like, explosive.
Like the lone wolves. Correspondents whose byline picture shows them resting their stern chin on their fist. Who sound dangerous and decisive. By using short sentences. Macho sentences. Hemingway sentences. Sentences steaming with menace. Smelling of sweat and marlin steaks and vomit. They’re hard but fair. With their women. With their horses. With their husbands. They desire climax. Illumination. They stalk it. It crouches, sinister in the long grass. A terse devastating pronouncement. Profound enough to deserve a line all to itself.
A single, chilling line.
But, then they carry on. They persist. Do not cease. Become laboured. Make a meal of it. Go a bridge too far. A cliché too many.
Is it any wonder that so many of their colleagues resort to arbitrarily placed rhetorical questions?
For some of them, apparently too timid to plunge straight in (or lacking anything of substance to say), the paragraphs of the mid- section provide a forum, a spotlight if you will, in which their love of circumlocution — the coy pastime of the authorial dabbler — is indulged in a plethora of phrases and clauses, each piling on the next like layers on a wedding cake or arbitrarily chosen similes; the likelihood of a resolution — or even a merciful, euthanasing colon (which, like parenthesis, provide temporary respite) — rapidly receding as their vocabulary distends into a lexicon of laborious, ostentatious and voluminous polysyllables, rendering facile scrutiny obsolete and the ontological quest defunct, until finally all the dashes and conjunctions and floating fragments come clattering down in a heap, which that — when because (however) — although perhaps ) ) — ) —
But not everybody writes like me. Sometimes one comes across a retiring columnist who mixes modesty and aloofness, and, adhering to the unspoken rule never to write about oneself, deliberately replaces every reference to the first person with a modest ‘one”.
Certainly one appreciates the gesture, and whenever one comes across it — as one did this week while reading a newspaper that once rejected a submission from one on the grounds that one had faint flair for humour but nothing worth saying (one asks you with tears in one’s eyes!) — one is reassured.
So why is there this explosion of commentators (some lucid, most lurid) in our print media? Why does even the most modest publication, Gestetnered on to both sides of a Wet Wipe and distributed once a year to the smaller municipalities of Gordonia, now feel compelled to ditch the shipping news and rainfall figures and other useful tidbits to make space for a columnist?
What unnatural hold does this journalistic gypsy tinker have on the imagination of readers and editors alike? How has a figure no more informed than an organ grinder on a soapbox become the royal taster, to swallow or spit out current affairs as he or she sees fit?
And, can five consecutive questions, full of unsubstantiated cultural generalisations and wordy innuendo, ever take the place of a well-crafted, old fashioned and neatly unifying conclusion? You bet.