DATELINE–The Circular Files

The Time Has Come for the FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM

1. The truth is a whore. She’ll go with anyone.

2. There are no longer any facts, just figures.

Figure a: A different O.J. Simpson in an identical pose on the covers of Time and Newsweek (June 27,1994).

Figure b: In a recent survey, one out of three dentists recommended using sugarless gum.

Figure c: Anorexia.

3. Connie Chung and Dan Rather are stuck in an elevator. Dan turns to Connie and says, “nothing.” Connie laughs politely and replies, “whatever.”

And the audience is listening.

4. We abhor the perfect future but we acknowledge the need for FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM.

5. Example: will have gone.

6. FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM reports news that has not yet happened. FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM reports news that may never happen. FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM reports the news that must not happen again.

7. Only your enemies will object to FUTURE PERFECT JOURNALISM.

8. We are the one true shining path. Shine a little light on me. This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine. The truth will set you free. Or at least 15 percent off.

9. They started this war. We’re going to finish it.

10. Our fictions are stars in the sky, fixed guides for those who dare lift their eyes from the ground.

DATELINE–Squaw Valley, Calif.

Head of Eli Lilly unconscious for hours after colliding with tree on the slopes of a Tahoe ski resort. Company’s own anti-depressants may be to blame.

Sidney Taurel , the president and chief executive officer of Eli Lilly and Company, makers of the popular anti-depressant drug Prozac, was seriously injured in a bizarre accident on the slopes of Squaw Valley Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe, California. Taurel was on hand for the debut of the resort’s multi-million dollar Funitel ski lift when he was hurt late Saturday afternoon.

According to eyewitnesses, Taurel was headed down the Cow Patch ski run when he suddenly ran into a tree. The 50 year-old executive, who is a proficient skier and accomplished tennis player, was unable to recall the incident upon regaining consciousness early Sunday morning.

The Cow Patch slope is the most recent addition to the resort’s famously popular runs which include the legendary Headwall, Siberia, Emigrant, Granite Chief, and Solitude. It was completed during the summer of 1998 and was touted as the “widest swath of snow-packed powder” west of Switzerland.

All the more surprising that such a tragic accident could befall a competent skier such as Taurel. A spokesperson for Squaw Valley has expressed sadness and concern over the particular details of Taurel’s crash, confirming that there were no other trees within a 300 foot radius of the accident site.

Carlos Foster, who was on hand at the time of the collision, was equally surprised when he witnessed Taurel suddenly crumple at the foot of a tree halfway down the Cow Patch run. “It was as if the tree jumped out and smacked him,” Foster said, “I had no idea what had happened at first.”

With the growing popularity of snowboarding and other “extreme” outdoor sporting activities, accidents have become a fact of life at the nation’s ski resorts. Major recreational centers have even established medical facilities on site to deal with the broken bones and torn ligaments that befall inexperienced or sometimes intoxicated skiers.

But by all accounts, Taurel was neither of these, and investigators have yet to determine the cause of the accident. If poor slope maintenance and design is found to be at fault, the ski resort could face a multi-million dollar lawsuit and, according to one expert, “some very bad publicity.”

There are reports, however, that Taurel had been experiencing nausea on the day of the accident and appeared to be “very tired” in the words of a ski lift operator who assisted him minutes before the collision. Rumors surfacing from the local hospital where Taurel was initially treated suggest that he may have been on anti-depressants at the time of the accident.

In fact, Taurel’s mishap could spell far greater trouble for the pharmaceutical giant than for the local ski resort. The timing couldn’t be worse for Eli Lilly, Taurel’s employer which earlier this month announced plans to market R-fluoxetine, a purer form of Prozac. Eli Lilly sold over $2.6 billion worth of Prozac to more than 35 million people in over 100 countries in 1997 alone.

DATELINE–San Francisco, Calif.

The first sighting of the Virgin Mary on the Internet.

Thousands flock to an obscure corner of the Web to catch a glimpse of the Virgin Mary. It is the first “Mary sighting” in history to take place in cyberspace.

Nearly 10,000 people a day are flocking to the modest Web site of Family’s Korean BBQ#2 restaurant (www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bridge/7601/index.html) to see the “Web Mary.” The Virgin’s image is said to appear in a thumb-sized photograph of “kim-chee,” a Korean dish of pickled cabbage.

The first sighting took place on a Friday night at an afterschool learning center located in the same San Francisco neighborhood as the Family’s Korean BBQ#2 restaurant.

Janet Liu had stopped by to pick up her nine-year-old daughter Ariel after spending the day shopping. While she was waiting for her daughter to finish her class, Liu happened to glance over at a nearby computer. It was then that she saw the face of the Virgin Mary on the restaurant’s Web page.

“I had an uncontrollable desire to cry, so I cried,” Liu told an interviewer on the local Chinese radio station, KVTO. “I called my daughter over and told her to look at the screen and asked her if she saw the Virgin Mary and she did.”

An hour after the Web site’s address was mentioned on the radio, Chung Rae Lee, the owner of Family’s Korean BBQ#2 restaurant was receiving phone calls from people who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary on his home page.

Rae Lee, who is a Presbyterian and prominent leader in San Francisco’s Korean community, was at first worried that the sightings would be bad for business. “The picture from our menu does not look like Mary on paper but after we put the picture on the Web even I can see the face.”

For a few hours on Saturday, Rae Lee removed the image from his restaurant’s page. But after receiving hundreds of e-mails and calls from all over the world he reversed his position and has returned the image to the Web site.

Even though thousands of people have visited the Family’s Korean BBQ#2 Web site over the last few days, Rae Lee states that he will not modify the contents of the page now that it has become so popular.

“I do not want to hide this image,” Rae Lee adds, “but this is not a business advertisement. We want only to respect an image that is important to so many people. If they want to visit that is OK with us, too.”

And they have come. Three days after the first sighting, the counter at bottom of the Family’s Korean BBQ#2 Web site had recorded 40,000 hits. Several “online shrines” have sprung up to celebrate the sightings of the Web Mary at the restaurant’s home page.

All of this attention has also produced a huge volume of e-mail. The electronic messages are now being forwarded to a local Catholic community organization which prints them out and collects them in a binder on display at a nearby Catholic church.

The responses range from simple prayers to people’s life stories. “Every day more and more messages arrive from the Internet,” reports Josephine Huang, one of the volunteers attending to the Web Mary’s e-mail. “They come from all kinds of people, from all over the world. One man wrote to say that he never expected to find God on the Web.”

In addition to the electronic communications and some curious visitors at his restaurant, Rae Lee has also received shipments of roses which fill the front window of Family’s Korean BBQ#2.

A spokesman for the local Catholic diocese says, “There’s no reason at this point to think that what’s appearing there cannot be explained by the technical facts of the matter… But if it gives some blessing, we’d like people to go and see it. We want to try to bring people back to a belief in something greater.”

DATELINE – Washington D.C.

Two prominent lesbians and a Congress that couldn’t care less.

When two top-ranking officials in the Clinton administration outed themselves last month in a national magazine, they expected a response. Perhaps some hate mail, a few calls for resignation from the Christian right, a Congressional hearing or two.

At the very least they figured the announcement would make its way into the opening monologues of Jay Leno and Bill Maher. Who knows, they might even find themselves on the receiving end of a wink from Arianna Huffington.

Instead, there was no response. None at all.

Ironically, these same two officials are notorious on Capitol Hill for their strong personalities and controversial initiatives.

One of them, Janet Reno, the U.S. Attorney General, is currently under fire for refusing to name a special prosecutor to investigate the business dealings of Harold Ickes. Reno is both the “Wicked Witch of Waco” and the woman who approved Ken Starr’s sordid sortie into Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes.

The other, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, has come under fire for championing needle exchange programs, appearing in print ads for the National Dairy Council, and advocating aggressive sex education in public schools.

Certainly neither of these two highly influential women are strangers to the harsh, and some say, politically motivated attacks of the media. Yet they’ve emerged unscathed from a profile in the November issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In the article, the pair revealed their plans “to rent a truck and put a bed in the back and just drive” when the current administration leaves office in 2000.

The stunning news is framed by a lyrical, black and white photograph of the couple taken in an plush conference room at the Department of Justice. The portrait which features Reno gazing wistfully from afar at a seated and contemplative Shalala was taken by famed celebrity photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

It is the first public outing of a Cabinet-level official since historians exhumed the tale of Alexander Hamilton’s ill-fated love affair with James Reynolds.

But unlike the Hamilton fiasco which is still a hotly debated historical puzzle, the Reno-Shalala bombshell has been met without gossip, vilification, or even shades of doubt.

“It’s because they’re women,” speculates Lilith Tomlinsen, a media analyst with the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Defamation League, “so no one can make the connection. It’s as if being ‘gay’ and being a ‘woman’ cancel each other out.”

Washington’s gay rumor mill reports that Reno and Shalala first hit it off when the two, along with former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, attended an National Gay and Lesbian Task Force dinner in 1994 to accept the “Honoring Our Allies” award. As the story goes, the two celebrated their fourth anniversary in the company of a few friends earlier this year.

To Tomlinsen and others, this media “nonevent” speaks volumes about the disingenuous nature of homophobia in mainstream politics. She cites Senator John McCain’s well-publicized joke about Chelsea Clinton having been “fathered” by Janet Reno to prove her point.

“The politicians and pundits have been calling Reno everything but a dyke to her face,” Tomlinsen opines, “but they don’t have the balls to utter a word now that the cat is out of the bag.”