Yesterday Norah and I were shopping at Trader Joe’s and we saw a couple of “reverse panhandlers.” A couple of handsome white-haired women, each armed with a fistful of dollars, were standing in front of the store passing out dollar bills. Un-begging. It was a brilliant piece of theater. People were clearly uncomfortable with the gesture, either refusing the hand-outs or quickly passing the buck to a nearby Teen Challenge solicitor.
But the Ventura County Star missed half the story in today’s front page article. Yes, people were “leery of Ventura giveaway” as the article headlined. But they were also leery of the two photographers armed with cameras, tripods and assault weapon grade telephoto lenses.
“What burns me, really burns me, is that they are taking pictures of people who take the money,” said a woman in the quick-check line in front of us at Trader Joe’s. What burned me is that the quick-check wasn’t fast enough for me to get outside and get my free dollar.
I always believe everything I read in the papers. Unless I witness the event personally and then the media gets it all wrong. In this case a couple of heavily armed photographers were clearly part of the event. Is this a publicity stunt? A sociological experiment? Norah and I had no idea that this is what news looks like when it’s in the making.
The Star reporter dances around notions of paranoia, suspicion and strings attached to every dollar bill that was handed out. Some people saw the kind gentlewomen giving out greenbacks and thought that there must be a catch. Well, duh. When you’ve got a ten thousand dollar, 600 millimeter telephoto lens trained on your face there certainly is a catch. You’re not getting your money for nothing and these chicks ain’t free. Your soul is ready to be uploaded into someone’s hard drive…and from there, who knows where. Maybe the next stop is the Ministry of Love.
“I just know that if I take that dollar, Uncle Sam is going to swoop down and grab his fifty cents,” said the woman in line at Trader Joe’s. It was kind of a weird thing for her to say, but I was tracking right along with her. My own mind leapt to Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, how people were put into a Czech prison simply because there was a photographic record of them at a protest event.
Reading the Star article, the thing that surprised me most is that the reporter and photographers were scrubbed from the event. It’s as if they weren’t there at all, even though they accounted for at least half the action on the scene.