Reality Hunger (27 page)

We’re living in a newsy time.

We live in difficult times; art should be difficult (my goal is to make every paragraph as discomfiting as possible).

Tying my shoes in the lobby of the recreation center, I saw someone reading what looked like
Checkpoint
, Nicholson Baker’s novel about a man who fantasizes about assassinating then president George W. Bush. I’d just finished reading the book, so I said, “Are you reading
Checkpoint
? How do you like it?” The reader seemed wary and was strikingly reluctant to respond with any specificity to my question. He asked if I was the writer David Shields. I am, the one, the only (actually, there’s at least one other writer named David Shields, a scholar who’s the author of a book called
Oracles of Empire
). Still, we talked
about
Checkpoint
and Baker only circumlocutiously. When I was ready to go, I well-meaningly but ill-advisedly said, “I’m David Shields; I guess you know that. What’s your name?”—which, of course, reanimated the entire spy-vs.-spy subtext, so he said, very slowly, “I’m Wes.” No last name. End of conversation. A new moment in the republic, so far as I could tell.

Shortly after 9/11, the Defense Department hired Renny Harlin, the writer-director of
Die Hard 2
, to game-plan potential doomsday scenarios; in other words, fiction got called to the official aid, reinforcement, and rescue of real life, as if real life weren’t always fiction in the first place.

I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction because we live in fictitious times.

People like you are in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality (judiciously, as you will), we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you—all of you—will be left to just study what we do.

The person who loses the presidential election is the person who seems most fictional. In 2000, Gore simply was Mr. Knightley from
Emma
. So, too, in 2004, Kerry—Lord Bertram from
Mansfield Park
. During the 2008 presidential election, reality hunger in the face of nonstop propaganda resulted in regime change. Obama won because of his seeming commitment to reality, the common sense of his positions. Obama came off as completely real, playing basketball and texting people on his BlackBerry and tearing up over his grandmother’s death. Both Hillary and McCain campaigned with all the logic of a Successories poster: they appeared to believe they could will their presidency into being simply by desiring it; no matter how behind they were by every real-world metric, they could still win by wishing it so.

Facts now seem important.

Facts have gravitas.

The illusion of facts will suffice.

In our hunger for all things true, we make the facts irrelevant.