It hard to take Jesse Ventura’s defamation suit seriously. Too much irony keeps getting in the way. I mean Jesse Ventura outraged that someone put too much show biz in their shtick? Gotta love it.
But whether he wins — which is doubtful, despite, I believe being warranted — I’d like to think his willingness to mount an attack will have, if only a momentary, impact on our vast, fetid “non-fiction” industry.
Our guy Jesse is many things. Among them: A grasping, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, thin-skinned galoot. But he is also positively reverential about the Navy SEALs and the bond of macho brotherhood with those who have served. Similarly, he has been unabashedly vocal about the War in Iraq since it was launched, saying rational, reality-based things about that misbegotten adventure I’ve still never heard from the likes of John McCain or Lindsey Graham.
For those reasons alone it is nearly impossible for me to believe that he ever said the SEALs “deserve to lose a few” to anyone, much less a group of actual (half drunk) SEALs practically in their own backyard. Even if he too was drunk or hell, on mescaline, like some sage native mystic, asking me to believe Jesse Ventura urged death on any of his brothers-in-shark-infested-waters is a bridge … way too far.
And based on the deposition of Chris Kyle, the now-deceased “American Sniper” himself, the whole incident at the bar in San Diego, with all the chest bumping, swaggering, taunting and brawling sounds deeply flaky, as in it made for a much better story when you’re trying to sell a tough guy/uber-patriot memoir. Certainly a lot better than letting Ventura get away with an anti-war crack. When your target audience is gun-worshipping, flag-waving, hoo rah wannabes, you slap that shit down … even if you actually didn’t.
Jesse’s fight coincides with right-wing fantasist Edward Klein’s latest best-seller, “Blood Feud”, in which we’re too believe the Obamas and the Clintons are, behind the scenes, in private, barely different in their connivery and blood lust than the Lannisters and the Starks on “Game of Thrones”. If Jesse thinks he got unfair treatment in Kyle’s book (ghost-written, of course) imagine how Hillary feels with Michele Obama calling her the “Hilldebeest”, and how about Barack pounding down the vino and bad-mouthing Bubba to his face? I always knew that guy a drunk and a boor. I mean, hell, did you see him boozing it up in Texas? W* never behaved like that.
Point being of course we rarely have any good reason to believe anything in a memoir — really, any memoir, including Hillary Clinton, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, every tired old statesman, jock, pop star, etc. — although, personally I’d actually read Vladimir Nabokov or William Styron in their own words than the ghost-written, demo-targeted tale of an expert rifleman, who despite the hagiographic lurches would never have been mistaken for Vasily Zaytsev defending Stalingrad from the Nazis.
And why stop with memoirs? The publishing industry has only the most loosely defined and even more loosely policed definition of “non-fiction”. It hardly matters to the average publisher, and not at all to the partisan houses pushing precisely what their demographic wants to hear, if no one can corroborate the author’s astonishing verbatim dialogue from private episodes between characters who’d rather flatten him under their limo wheels than grant him an interview.
House attorneys may scour books for the most egregious slander, to avoid time-sucking litigation. But once into the realm of “celebrity” or “public person”, why waste time checking and deleting the juicy stuff that might accelerate on the Interwebs and move product? If the aggrieved celebrity yob wants to declare the whole thing an insult to nature and a hideous, despicable lie, well hell, thank them for being stupid and vain enough to goose the publicity effort.
According to reports from the Ventura trial, Jesse’s original complaints about the Kyle book spiked sales and delighted the publisher, proving again that the best offense in the face of obscene offense is … nothing. Ignore it. The shelf life of the average, under-publicized unlitigated memoir is about as short as a mayfly, or a jihadi in a sniper’s crosshairs.
Doesn’t anyone ever consider the possibility that Mr. Kyle may have been deaf, or may have simply misheard Mr. Ventura? The acoustics in most bars are hardly conducive to accurate interpretation of another person’s statements. Body language is 90% of interpersonal communication anyway.
Picture a bunch of SEALs in a group, still commemorating a fallen comrade. The testosterone is sloshing around, right up to the eardrums. Here comes Jesse Ventura, former UDT member with no known experience in having been actually shot at. Ventura is (presumably figuratively) swinging his dick, trying to make up for a lot of things.
How likely is it that anyone was listening carefully? How likely is it that Ventura
did in fact puff out his chest and grunt something that was interpreted as an affront to their collective dignity?
As to the forthcoming jury verdict, I suspect Mr. Ventura will be looking at a bill from Mrs. Kyle’s lawyers, attached to an order that says he has to pay it.
That’s an entirely possible scenario, But then how do explain Mr. Kyle publishing, definitively, what he believes Jesse said?
It cannot be an entirely novel concept that people believe they heard what they think they heard.
How else can we explain politics?
As I say, I don’t think Jesse will prevail here. Mainly because his assertion of “harm” is pretty hard to tie directly to this book. But I’d like to see him or someone slap down a publishing industry that routinely traffics in what I call “reckless indifference”, which to my civilian thinking is a form of malice.
To your point, we’d all be in a better place if we applied the same degree of hostile skepticism to this “non-fiction” junk as we do to politicians.
“We report. You decide.”
translates to, “We fill you with lies and keep you distracted from the stuff you need to be concerned with.”
Yea, pretty much. And …it’s a damned lucrative business.