carybrunswick.com
Do obituary before it's too late
When I left my editor’s job at a daily newspaper years ago, I promised our news clerk that I would be sending along my obituary so she could keep it on file. That way, when the time came, all she would have to do is plug in the date. Guess what? I haven’t followed through, though I have not avoided thinking about the subject. Obituaries have changed so much over the last quarter century; I simply have not been able to decide how to write it. I know this may seem like a grim subject, and it can be, I guess, but it is something we all have to deal with at some point. You know, there are birth notices, graduations, weddings, career accolades and, eventually, obituaries. They are part of our lives. It is no coincidence that obituaries are the most-read section of most newspapers. Until about 1990, newspapers treated obituaries as news; they were published free of charge and followed a strict style that required factual statements. After the mini-recession in the late 1980s, most newspapers started charging a fee for obits. That led to a loosening of the news style. Families were permitted to say just about anything they wanted, since obits had to be treated more like paid ads. That’s why today you often see much more than the traditional "who, what, why, where and when’’ in the first paragraphs of obituaries. It is not uncommon to read that so-and-so died and went home to join ancestors with the lord in heaven. Years ago, you couldn’t say that. Also forbidden by traditional style were adjectives describing how accomplished or great people were. Today, you could read that someone was the nicest guy in town and spent his life helping others. That may or may not be true, so in the old days you couldn’t say it in an obit. So, today, the choices are endless for what you might want to say in your own obituary or that of a family member, which can make it all the more challenging to proceed. There was a time when I thought people should start writing their autobiographies at about age 30, with the idea that they would be just about ready to wrap it up when the time came to do so. Then, an obituary would be more like a ``Cliff Notes’’ version of your life story. However, how do you know someone is telling the truth in an autobiography? What if liberties are taken, and positive situations are enhanced and negative ones are played down or omitted all together? It may not matter. I believe it was Albert Camus who wrote that the lies one tells about oneself show us as much about that person as the truths. Or, to quote him, ``Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.’’ In that case, our autobiographies become more like memoirs in which you are permitted to embellish your life experiences, using fiction to tell the truth. So where does that leave us when it is time to write our obituaries, when you are permitted to state the unverifiable as if it were fact, and describe an exemplary life even if it were not? Whether you’ve been working on an autobiography or not, it is never too early to plan your obituary. If you are still young, it can be a good exercise in deciding what you would like your obituary to say decades from now, sort of like setting goals and pursuing them. Naturally, to state that you died, nothing happened, and went nowhere but into nothingness is really no more factual than saying you gloriously entered some majestic kingdom of the afterlife. I have yet to see an obituary that stated the deceased immediately descended into hell. Just in case, I guess no one wants to say that. For myself, I could go beyond the facts of my existence as a journalist, editor and writer, husband and father, reader and golfer, by making each of those aspects of my life into varieties of human greatness. Or, I could stick to the facts. Anyway, now you might see the quandary of proceeding with my obituary. Being able to write anything you want, fact or fiction, provides a lot of freedom and turns the project into a difficult undertaking. And every time I see our news clerk around town, I have to explain that I’m still working on it, and vow that I definitely will get it to her before it’s too late.
The proliferation of managed news, propaganda and fake news, which often are outright lies, continues to be one of the major issues of our time and likely for many years to come. And that is only because so many people have lost faith in encountering truth and so tend to believe whatever they might read or hear. I don’t like the term “fake news,” though I’ve often used it myself. News that is not true, or at least is not based on facts, is a lie. Placing the word “news” in the phrase “fake news” lends too much credibility to what is really a lot of bull. A lie. It doesn’t matter what the motive is for those who want to spread lies on the Internet. They are still lies, and the fact that so many people take them to be truth has become one of our era’s major problems. And you’re right. It doesn’t help that the president is always telling lies that many people seem to believe are facts. Lies, presumably, have been around since humans first learned to talk instead of grunt, though even the meaning of those sounds and gestures could be used to convey untruths. Lying, about your neighbor at least, was prevalent enough to be forbidden in the Ten Commandments, though far down on the list at No. 9. With the invention of the printing press in the 15th century it became possible to disseminate lies to a much wider audience rather then relay their passage by word of mouth. And, often, it was almost impossible to know the difference between what was true and what was not. In the 19th century, newspapers openly had a point of view and in our own country often were known as Republican or Democratic in their slant on the news and opinion. It wasn’t until early in the last century that the ideal of objective journalism gained favor, leading readers, listeners and eventually viewers to trust their sources of information. That trust, however, made it possible for authoritarian governments, such as the Nazis in Germany, to fire up propaganda machines. Our government has often tried to manage the news, and that practice has reached an extreme today with the Trump administration’s output of lies and distortions. “If statements were printed, they must be true” was a belief that, unfortunately, has carried over to our modern digital age. The Internet and social media have made the spreading of lies instantaneous and too many people suffer from the delusion that whatever is posted online must be true. The late media critic and television producer Danny Schechter warned of “fake or fudged news” as early as 2000, before the prevalence of social media. “As individuals, we also have to take responsibility for our own media choices,” he said then, cautioning that “reliance on minimal sources can be dangerous to mental health and growth.” President George W. Bush and his administration were experts at managing the news and lying to convince the public that an invasion of Iraq was warranted and necessary. And Bush and his cohorts were notorious for handpicking town-meeting audiences and even staging fake news conferences. The Trump administration has turned those practices into a science. And now, with all the social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and so many websites that have an ax to grind in one way or another, it is becoming more difficult for even open-minded people to know when the news they encounter is bogus. After all, people can be convinced to buy certain products by advertisers, so it’s not surprising they will believe what they see on the Internet. The outlook is not positive, according to historian and author Jacob Soll, who wrote in Politico magazine a few years ago that real news is not coming back in a meaningful way because so many people do not “rely on professionally reported news sources and so much news is filtered via social media and by governments. “And as real news recedes,” he continued, “fake news will grow. We’ve seen the terrifying results this has had in the past -- and our biggest challenge will be to find a new way to combat the rising tide.” Facing that challenge is even more difficult under a Trump second-term presidency. We are experiencing more strenuous attempts to control the flow of real news and, through lies and fakery from his bully pulpit, the touting of a vision of our nation and the world that makes many people cringe.