I really like Chuck Klosterman, and so should you. And so should your friends. And your friends' relatives and let's throw a mailman or two in there, I don't care. I like him because he is very honest and (humble?) if you will, in his journalistic approach.
I was recently listening to This American Life (a favorite radio program in the Robertson home), and Klosterman was doing a feature about traveling. He spoke of his recent trip to Germany which lasted nine days. He was especially interested in how Germans felt about Americans. What he discovered was that Germans focused on the wrong things when it came to popular culture in America. They thought Americans were obsessed with cowboys, with Carson Daly and Baywatch. They had it all wrong because mostly, they had little information to work with, and didn't bother to gather more.
When Klosterman returned to the US, someone asked him, "What's Germany like?" And his only response was, "I have no idea." They enquired, "But didn't you just go there for nine days?" "Yes, I did. And I have no idea what it is like." Surely, he could speculate and turn self-centered events of the long week into paragraphs of analysis about German culture, but he would be dead wrong, and he knows it.
We do this all the time. We gather tidbits of information on something and turn it into a worldview that is based on nothing. We must be more careful. We do this about places we've visited, people we've met, and even Christ. We know the story, (basically), but fail to dig deeper because we feel it has little relevance for our lives. Here is to serious journalistic investigation. And to donkey rides. And my wife. She's a winner. And she brings me candy.
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