I know a fellow who has a remarkable propensity for taking the basic facts of stories told him by other people and making them his own. If I share with this fellow — let’s call him “Red,” since I don’t know anyone by that name — an anecdote about a distant relative of mine who once showed up at a family event with a big bandage on his hand and a tale of having lost a finger to a circular saw in his workshop, then he will pass on that anecdote to others as something that happened to him or his. Red will tell a version of my story, but in greatly embellished form, with links in the chains of causation and outcome reordered and the dramatis played out by different personae.
In such a retelling, my distant relative becomes Red’s first cousin, his bosom boyhood pal. Red himself is in the story, not as one who hears the news of the lost finger after the fact, but as a 14-year-old who was in fact there when the digit was separated from its owner, the aforementioned cousin, with whom Red was building a sled — or a soapbox racer or a motorcycle ramp or a tree fort — when the cousin’s attention wandered away from the whirring blade of the saw they’d “borrowed” from an uncle. And it was young Red who, thinking quickly, scooped up the finger, hot-wired the uncle’s old Ford pickup truck and drove his cousin 12 miles to the hospital where it was reattached.
It’s thrilling in its way, hearing a 30-second tidbit of your own conversational flotsam transformed into a heroic tale of boyish sangfroid. It cannot be unlike the sensation of seeing one’s life “adapted” for a Hollywood movie (which brings to mind something Katharine Hepburn once said — a remark not entirely germane to my point here, but worth repeating nonetheless: “I don’t care what is written about me, as long as it isn’t true.”).
But it can also be annoying, a thing that never occurs to Red. Another friend called him on it once, when we were all at a social gathering. Red was five minutes into regaling a group of folks with the saga of some exploit or another when our friend was compelled to interject. I will not reproduce here the various profanities that served as both prefix and suffix to the interjection, but the basic message was, “Red, that’s me you’re talking about. That stuff — what’s true of it, anyway — happened to me. And I’m standing right here.”
Red’s self-possession was magisterial. His reply was immediate.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
What Red did next resonates with me to this very same moment, evoking always the decidedly mixed emotions of disbelief, amusement, perplexity and sneaking admiration. Picking up precisely where’d he’d left off, Red finished the story, by which I mean his story, his appropriated and personalized “true” story. Despite the fact that all within immediate earshot now knew that it was not Red’s story, each and every one of those same people — including the actual protagonist of the tale — remained enraptured. No one — again, inclusive of the person with whose facts Red was absconding before our eyes — was roused to dispute him.
Why did none of us dispute him? Mostly, I think, because Red is such a good storyteller. He has a gift for plausible embellishment, and dances deftly between the subjective role of protagonist and the omniscient one of narrator. A big part of Red’s genius, such as it is, lies in is his ability to take my story, or my friend’s or yours or that of anyone else with whom he has ever conversed, and to make it his own, in every sense of that phrase.
For Red, the truth is never at issue, because the “truth” flows from the way the facts are arranged. As long as Red presents a plausible version of something his listeners might receive as the truth, then he is free to fashion and refashion the facts to fit a narrative that informs and reinforces that perception. The story becomes “true” both in the telling and the receiving of it — the manner in which it falls on the ears and is integrated into thought processes, and the extent to which people ultimately believe and accept it.
From Red, this is a harmless quirk, even a little endearing. But from the elected leaders of our community, the propensity to tell a story Red’s way — appropriating successes, altering and eliding details, arranging facts to suit the narrative — is purely and simply a means of distracting us from the business of citizenship, of making sure that we keep our eye on the hole and not the doughnut.
From Birmingham City Hall alone, a host of serious questions emanate relative to the expenditure of public dollars — on out-of-town travel, on pet projects, on contracts with cronies, on so many parties that it might require additional salaried positions on the staffs of Mayor Bell and the City Council just to keep track of them all. Answers to such questions — when they come at all, which is seldom — are couched in the contours of the narrative that Everything is Great in Birmingham, and that anyone who questions that assertion is, to stoop to the vernacular, one of the “haters,” a lost soul on a doomed mission to stand in the way of all this progress the city is making.
Yes, and here is where our elected officials leave my pal Red in the shade. While Red ultimately doesn’t mind ending up as the butt of his own joke, these folks take themselves and their storytelling far too seriously. Or, to be more charitable, they misunderstand the social contract that exists between elected officials and the people who elect them; they are operating under an incorrect definition of public service.
When the mayor arrives at a neighborhood function amid an armada of SUVs and a phalanx of entourage and armed protection. When a city councilor lectures a speaker in the council chamber for not “respecting” the council. When elected officials dance deftly between the subjective role of protagonist and the omniscient one of narrator, positioning themselves as both claimants of the hero’s mantle and the entity by which the mantle is conveyed. When seeking to hold presumptive public servants accountable for the effectiveness and efficiency with which government addresses the needs of the people is portrayed as attacking a particular official or body…
When these things happen — when efforts to avoid questions, and to marginalize those who dare to question the “truth” of the accepted story are successful — then democracy is compromised. Progress is delayed, diverted or derailed entirely. People remain poor, uneducated, underserved and unable to forge for themselves a path to a better life. Cities, communities, regions, states never reach their potential.
We are fortunate to live in Birmingham at a time when evidence of “good things” happening all around us abounds, and when our well-known “perpetual promise” seems on the verge of being fulfilled. But if we listen only to the story of growth and prosperity, and fail to understand that our prospects are limited precisely to the extent that we allow ourselves to be distracted from the deep-rooted issues that have always held Birmingham back, then we’re never going to change the culture — of underachievement, of exploitation and repression, of corruption and calumny — that has kept us from our birthright.
Because sooner or later, if it’s only a good story we’re after, the truth is going to get in the way.
