Believe It or Not
by
Margaret Cracknell
This is an article for my non-fiction class, decrying the fiction that passes for truth in so many minds. So this is all about non-fiction that is really fiction.
Long line-ups at the grocery checkout drive me crazy. I used to grab a magazine off the rack and skim through it while I waited. Often an article that looked interesting proved to be the same old thing regurgitated in a different form. Disappointing, but it saved me the cost of buying it. Now I've moved on to tabloids. You don't have to read them, just read the headlines.
"CUBA LAUNCHING SHARK ATTACK ON U.S. - Castro's evil plot to terrorize our beaches!" Such a headline comes under National Threat to our cherished way of life.
"SHROUD OF TURIN OPENS ITS EYES!" Wow! The shroud of Turin! That's always a grabber. Matters mystical and supernatural verge on doom and gloom foreboding the end of the world. The end of the world is always a thriller.
"WOMAN WITH THREE BREASTS MARRIES MAN WITH THREE ARMS! Gives birth to baby with three legs!" Yes, you heard right, three breasts. Nice that she married a man with three arms. In moments of passion the third breast might have felt left out if her husband had only two arms! Headlines like this fall under the heading, Gruesome freaks, along with the 90-lb one-year-old that his mother cannot lift and the wolf-boy who was discovered in the jungle. Do wolves live in jungles? These fall under the bizarre category.
National disasters, threats foretelling the end of the world (that comes up frequently), doom and gloom and freaks of nature, interesting and terrifying as they may be to those who believe them, are all outshone by gossip.
Wonderful gossip about real people. The beautiful, well-loved film star that comes home early and surprises her husband in bed with her neighbour, Arnold. Yes, Arnold. Oh, dear; but it's all right, you are allowed to talk about that now, and do the tabloids talk! Divorce was once the juiciest gossip. That's bland now.
And of course there is always the British Royal Family. They are good for sensationalism any time. "'MY MOTHER WAS MURDERED.' William vows to track down Di's killer." The Americans have their own 'royal' family: the Kennedy's. They are always good for a scandal. J.F.K. may have passed into history, but the tabloids still live off him and his relatives.
"Truth is stranger than fiction," so the saying goes. That may be, but fiction served up as the truth is what pays in the lurid world of the tabloids.
These headlines are just one day's reading in the checkout line-up. This week I see, "AUTOPSY SHOWS DI WAS PREGNANT. William is broken-hearted." Poor young man. Why don't they leave him alone?
