A reading, from
Back to Blood, by the late, great Tom Wolfe. In the
brilliant passage from the novel, one of the lead characters, Ed Topping, is looking with disdain upon a young newspaper reporter named John Smith who Topping is meeting with in his office:
Jesus, Ed Topping said to himself. This kid is a classic. People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success… Yeah—and in real life they’re about as colorful as John Smith here.
If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay.
But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line.
Reporters are often weak, envious tattletales by nature, motivated chiefly by their desire to cut down to size people who remind them of the stronger kids who made them feel relatively small and insignificant when they were young. Not just at age six, like Wolfe says, but all the way through their formative years. Nobody in life ever really graduates from high school.
