[promoted by BooMan]
Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
A couple months ago I got a cryptic email from someone claiming to be a reporter from the Washington Post; he asked me to call him in regard to a story he wanted to write.
I looked him up on the Internet… turns out David Finkel is a Pulitzer-prize nominated reporter for the Washington Post. Still, easy to write an email and use someone else’s name, right? So I called him.
It was for real. Finkel said he got my name from an email someone sent him, which led him to My Left Wing. He’d never been to a blog before (gasp! I thought EVERYBODY read the blogs!), and was intrigued not only by the medium but by my particular ‘blog voice,’ if you will.
And he wanted to write a piece about me. For the Style section, no doubt, I guessed.
Nope. Front page, baby.
Finkel pitched the story to his editors and got the okay, on the condition I promise not to write about it before it ran on the Post’s website, which I did.
A week later, he was here in my living room. He sat on my couch and explained that he didn’t yet know what he was going to write, didn’t have in mind any angle. He did have a phrase weaving in and out of his mind: “The Angry Left.” Apparently I am the Angry Left personified.
Nevertheless, he sat on the couch with a notebook and we conversed. He watched me work on the blog, he asked me a million questions, some quite provocative: for a while there, I got the feeling he thought my writing on My Left Wing and all my passionate, vitriolic rhetoric was so much pissing in the wind. What did I hope to accomplish? Why was I so… “mean?” That was the word he used, too, which didn’t bode well for my eventual representation in the article, I mused.
Finkel asked what time I woke up. 5am, I replied. That threw him a tad, but he was game: we agreed that the next day he would wait outside my house until I turned on the porchlight, to signal he could come in and be with me for an “ordinary day.” That plan kind of fell by the wayside, though — there is nothing ordinary about having a Washington Post reporter watching your every move and taking note of your every random exclamation and mutter…
Still, we achieved a sort of rhythmic normalcy as he observed and took notes for almost 12 hours. He came back the next day and we did it again, though we did manage to go out for lunch. The Post paid the tab; I was shocked to learn that Finkel would not accept a glass of water from me; he didn’t want the slightest hint of impropriety, which meant not even using our bathroom, I discovered. Very strange, I thought.
We never did fully discuss that, but suffice to say I think David Finkel is an almost preternaturally ethical guy. At one point he brought out a camera (don’t even get me started on my neurotic fear of having a horrible picture of me on the Front Page of the Washington Freaking Post)… but the light was bad. I asked if it would be better with the curtains open and he demurred; that, apparently, is creating the news rather than reporting it. (I keep thinking about that scene in “Broadcast News” when Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter chastise a cameraman who tells a Sandinista to put on his boots so he can get a good shot…)
Finkel returned for a fourth visit, but just to wrap things up and say goodbye. As the weeks passed, we spoke on the phone intermittently; at one point he got assigned to another, more time-sensitive story and mine was put on the back burner. Still, he assured me, the story would run.
But for the immigration brouhaha, Finkel’s piece might have run last week… As it is, for better or worse, the front page of the Washington Post’s Saturday edition tomorrow will feature an article by David Finkel about My Left Wing, left wing bloggers and… me.
And it’s already up on their website. Go figure.
