The Journal of Provincial Thought

clippings from a hedge

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The JPT “morgue,” to use correct journo slang, is stuffed with clippings that illustrate the True Pyrrhonian Futility of Phenomena, housed in the John and Sandra Bolin Archives of Astounding News & Queasy Queries.  Here are choice examples from the There’ll Always Be an England File, which may be followed in future issues by more exempla, should this bagatelle gain favor with the masses.

Reviewing pygmies with the Emperor

Actually, it was the press corps drank most of the wine, not so much in euphoric toasting of our plum assignments to the cannibal Emperor’s coronation in this Central African Republic. 

There just wasn’t much else sane to do between prostrations before the 56-year-old Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who after hitting his stride in the French army and subsequently hacking his way up the rungs in his own country’s armed forces, after overthrowing his cousin David and making himself President and then President for Life, apparently had decided that a promotion to Emperor was the next step in his programmed manifestation as God.

For three days there blared and surged a coronation celebration costing the equivalent of this impoverished country’s GNP.  After the Sunday crowning, some two thousand guests at a gala dinner reportedly “consumed two tons of imported champagne and 150 tons of wine” before calling it an evening at 4 A.M.

Many no doubt drank for courage.  The Emperor is said to be fond of having his enemies cooked and served to visiting dignitaries without revealing whom they’re eating.          

Emperor Bokassa’s hunting buddy and steadiest uranium customer, French President Giscard d’Estaing, was not seen in his usual quarters at the palace.             

On the final day, according to sources, the Emperor “Little Forest” I (or Bokassa, in M’Baka), a startling figure appearing like a great plumed bird courting prey, sat upon a gold-plated throne mounted in an open Land Rover and reviewed the closing two-hour parade of glorifiers.  He had opted back to the 1700’s for the gold-trimmed trousers, frock coat and frilled hat of an admiral; this Emperor was taking no chances with the visibility of his new clothes.

He was there both to see and to be seen.

Among the estimated 200,000 marchers—two hundred thousand—were, according to sources awake and sober enough to see, “a group of four-foot-high pygmy women from the Empire’s southern rain forests, two bands, columns of troops clad in jungle camouflage and armed with Soviet AK-47 assault rifles and a corps of red-skirted drum majorettes clad in white busby hats.  There were also bare-breasted women dancers and musicians who played four-foot-long treebark trumpets.”

Emperor Bokassa, it is fair to recall, spent an awfully lot of years in France.

            ...Reference

“Emperor reviews pygmies, ” UPI, Bangui—(Manchester) Guardian   December 12, 1977

Sounds a lot like a New Year’s bowl game halftime, except for the treebark trumpets.

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Battle of Buns Triggers Putsch of Puns    

Flights into Paris were choked with reporters scrambling for advantage in the journalistic free-for-all attending Prime Minister Barre’s economic pratfall.    

Worldwide, newspapers ever flush in their raison d’être sprang to arms, and upon this gingerbread city advanced their word warriors with orders to quip and jab and pun their way to unconditional usurpation of all vestiges of documentary dignity.

In a half-baked bid to peg the prices that pastry makers may charge for croissants, presumably thence to confect a broader policy for holding price lines, Mr. Barre (also conveniently titled Minister of Economy and Finance) had decreed that the price of chocolate buns be cut from 17p to 15p, and that croissants au beurre go for 13 ½p instead of the prevailing 16p.

His similar effort at pegging the price of new Beaujolais wine served in restaurants had soured as alternate wines were served instead.  Political embarrassment left him in knead of a doughier sector to squeeze.    

 The war of the croissants was on, and Mr. Barre would be taken to the wheat shed by a breed of baker whose cunning he had sorely miscalculated. 

 Initially ceasing production of the targeted treats, shopkeepers regrouped and struck back hard with a line of costlier supercroissants.  According to one reporter who actually went out on the street to check, these “include la vraie religieuse (the truly religious)—a chastely round bun, selling at 37p; the papillon (butterfly), fluffier at 17 1/2p, and the petit louver (22 1/2p).” 

 Another reporter, who overheard a team of reporters brainstorming in what they assumed was a secure environment, reported the advent of “the petit Barre, 18p, for all the world resembling the traditional chocolate bun, only a little chubbier round the middle.”  That reporter’s report was intercepted by this reporter.

 The bakery high guard insist the new entries “are all superior products—nothing to do with the old croissants,” according to one reporter’s notes snatched from a wastebasket.  The proof, they say, is in the pudding. 

 Perhaps.  Yet, there are those speaking from shadows who find themselves unable to hold their tongues.  A scruffy aproned lad from one bakery snorted, in that consummately French way, that the only thing new about the petit Barre (inspired by reporters) was “ze shape.”  And, of course, ze price. 

 At another shop, butter croissants indistinguishable from the originals were selling at 1p more than before Mr. Barre’s imposed pricing.  “Mais oui, Monsieur,”  the baker explained, “but these have milk in them.”

 The Prime Minister’s miseries are the bread and butter of the ravenous press.  “Pricing No Cakewalk for Mr. Barre,” scream notes scrawled on napkins and hastily affixed to corporate carrier pigeons. “Bakers Go Against PM’s Grain.”  “Patisseries Pinch a Piece of the Pie.” “No Peace of Cake for Prime Minister.”  “Barre, Baker Relations Frosting.” “A Few More Surprises in the Oven, Say Bakers.”      

“PM Fares No Batter with Buns than with Wine.” 

Fueled by intense competition, the going black-market rate for a premium caption—something better than the above—has skyrocketed.     

“Parisians are amused rather than butter. . .” penned one correspondent, only to have his pad ripped from his hands by a roving reporter rival who instantly melted into the manicured hedges.  The so-so line was eventually swapped for beer.

 The Prime Minister’s spokesman attempted to sugarcoat Mr. Barre’s latest embarrassment after tartly rejecting the idea that a war, as suggested by reporters egging him on, was raging.  He assured them that talks were underway with bakers to roll out a mutually agreeable resolution.

 But “no more crumby deals” was the clear concensus.

 Far has the Prime Minister fallen in the sixteen months since Monsieur le Président d’Estaing éclaired him “the best economist in France.”  As noted by one reporter who normally reports only about food, “For Mr Barre, defeat in the croissant war is more than symbolic.  As a technocrat ‘above politics,’ he has staked his prestige on holding a price line which has so far largely failed to respond to his treatment.”

Hey, Edward R. Murrow—who asked you? 

...Reference

“Bakers roll over Barre,” Walter Schwarz—(Manchester) Guardian  December 14, 1977

A nation of wily shopkeepers and bun-eating surrender monkeys?

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ARC not laughing at humper’s lump

The Arthritis and Rheumatism Council today kicked off National Arthritis Week with a much-anticipated press address, said sources close to the podium.    

Or so the story might have begun.  In fact, the ARC simply released a publication entitled “Arthritis, Everybody’s Problem,” leaving reporters groping amidst withering masses of arcane jargon and blinding squalls of numbers for a point of reference from which to unleash the art of glib cliché and whimsical slicing & shuffling of facts essential to proper coverage.

That reference is ideally supplied by chatty intermediaries—eyewitnesses who may be quoted in print, circumventing abstruse technical detail with little risk to reporters’ own intellectual reputations.  

Enticed by prospects of anonymous fame, witnesses are finally emerging to indicate that they have read the ARC report or spoken directly with others who have done.  Presto, this reporter’s “arthritis problem” solved.

“It all comes down,” says one young mother of three, “to arthritis and rheumatism being what we get most of here in Britain, in terms of disabling diseases.  See this photo, it’s me mum’s Covent Garden tummy, really nasty.  She’s tried meditating, but it’s only made it worse.”       

A former priest angrily pulls back his collar to reveal a nontrivial lump on the back of his neck.  “Is this the will of God?” he demands.  “Billingsgate hump they call it.  Say the fishmongers all down at market have the damn things.  I’ve never carried fish in my life!  Stinking things make me ill!”

He waves the ARC report at me.  “Says in here half a million of us blighters are crippled or deformed by rheumatoid arthritis. . . lessee. . . ‘more than five times the figure that suffer from some form of osteoarthritis, and still more from the other 200 or so different types of rheumatic disease.’  Is this the will of God?  God of what, of humper’s lump?  Ye shall come down with weaver’s bottom, and know that ye be blessed?”  He jams the report in a wall duct and stalks off, muttering and trailing a faint whiff of brimstone.

Other stories emerge: of miner’s elbow, of housemaid’s knee, of hodman’s shoulder and tailor’s ankle—all names for forms of arthritis and rheumatism.  One can feel the pain of victims, albeit mixed with a perverse amusement that generally eludes them. 

“None of these forms of arthritis and rheumatism is a joke,” lectures the ARC report, which in final resort this reporter has opened.  “More than 37 million working days are lost annually by men alone—that figure does not include rheumatic problems resulting from injured at work, or the increasing number of employed married women . . .”

What the hell. . . 

...Reference

“Weaver’s bottom is no joke,” —(Manchester) Guardian  June 5, 1978

Let me get this straight: it’s called “rheumatism and arthritis”—or what?

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