why I choose ficton

If you've read the novel The Kite Runner, you know about the beauty, tradition, and incredible danger of kite-fighting in Afghanistan. If you've read or watched American news, on the other hand, you've only heard half of it.

My friend Melissa sent me this article from the South African newspaper The Star: "'Innocent' kite festival marred by 11 deaths." See, the kite strings are often coated in glass shards, or are replaced altogether with sharp wire; victory is marked by celebratory gunshots. It turns out that the strings are sharp enough to cut throats, and randomly fired guns...well, we Americans know all about that one.

Khaled Hosseini presents kite-fighting in all of its complexity in his novel. He waxes nostalgic without denying the darker side of things. He trusts his readers enough to present one person's ambivalent experience of the event, letting us draw our own conclusions. The kite festivals are background to the relationships, here; still, as is so often true in a good novel, the background is captured with the honest realism we can no longer expect from the news. Maybe there's freedom in writing in a genre that is explicitly subjective; lord knows the objective journalists seem to have completely lost track of the truth amidst all of the confirmed facts and double-checked sources.

In painting the Taliban regime as one of pure, irrational evil, the media flaunted the kite-flying ban as exhibit A. They neglected to mention any possible reason for the ban (i.e. preventing needless deaths), leaving us imagining the innocent kites of our childhoods, snatched from our hands by insane fundamentalists. The reports came with a built-in reaction for us to voice, as if we were reading from a script:

JOURNALIST: Under this regime, the centuries old tradition of kite-flying has been banned.
AUDIENCE (murmuring animatedly): That's crazy! What else do they do? They probably kill kittens and outlaw picnics! I'm so glad we liberated those poor people!

Nobody seemed interested of disabusing Americans of the notion that kite-flying was the most innocent of all entertainments and that the ban was pure and random meanness. Here's a great article from 2001 that studiously preserves that notion. A few choice quotes:

For the five years the Taliban were in power, Boba Abdul Shukor had to sell his wares in secret. His contraband was not drugs or pornography or alcohol, but one of the oldest symbols of freedom, the modest kite. In the joyless world of the Taliban, scratching the heavens with the soaring paper fantasies was an offense to God.

...Families rushed to restore a favorite holiday pastime in which boys and young men throng a broad dusty field on the city's outskirts for 'kite fighting.' When two kite strings collide, one tends to break, bestowing victory on the contestant still flying.

Tends to break?
Here's a headline from The Christian Science Monitor:

Paper-string symbols of freedom fill Afghan skies: Kite-flying, a decades-old tradition for Afghans, makes a comeback. Like most entertainment, it was banned by the Taliban.

Thanks for doing my thinking for me, guys. Normally I like to figure out symbolism on my own. How fun would it be if Steinbeck wrote, "Petting the mouse with his thumb, Lenny crushed it, a symbol of the latent danger of his naive strength"? Fortunately, fiction writers don't treat their readers like idiots.

Diane Sawyer calls kite-fighting "poetic and artistic," "a delicate and beautiful piece of the past" practiced by "olympic-quality kite athletes." Sure, all that's probably true, but the omission is glaring. For this simpering, self-congratulatory kind of journalism to run rampant accomplishes three things that I can see: 1) it insults Americans' intelligence 2) it patronizes and infantilizes the Afghani people ("all they want to do is fly their pretty kites.") and 3) it makes me wonder what else is being conveniently omitted from the news.

If the tables were turned, which American laws could, with a pinch of omission, be spun as equally unfair and cruel restrictions on innocent fun? Cockfighting (also a 'decades-old tradition' where I live)? Drag racing? The French could easily spin our drinking age as puritanical madness (they probably have, come to think of it).

How about Jarts, for crying out loud? Lawn darts were among my family's favorite holiday pastimes back in the '70s, but they were banned in 1998 after four kids were killed. Where's Diane Sawyer? She could come to my grandmother's house, learn how to make opaque jello salad, and sit with me on the porch as I remember the days when we were free to play Jarts...eventually I'll segue into fond memories of cherry bombs and roman candles (also banned). Her teaser:

In the joyless world of the American West, aiming colorful projectiles at circles on the ground and illuminating the heavens with brilliant lights were an offense to the state.

She'll conveniently leave out the part about the folks killed by stray jarts and the missing fingers on the neighbor kid's left hand. That would compromise the tone of the piece.

Didn't we all, in one U.S. history course or another, study the anti-Japanese propaganda of WWII as if it were an egregious excess our country had outgrown? Didn't we feel foolish as we looked back on the public discourse regarding the color of Manuel Noriega's underpants? Maybe I just need to go back to U.S. history class and accept the fact that, as this ABC news article puts it, "Demonizing the Enemy [is] a Hallmark of War."

I guess we have evolved a bit: I should be glad that the target of negative propaganda nowadays is the country's leaders rather that its entire populace, though the intense and patronizing romanticization of the "folk" and their traditions seems no more honest, only more benign. We used to portray Germans, Japanese, and Italians as dangerous animals. Now we show Afghanis as harmless and quaint kite-flying children. Is one less insulting than the other? Is one less dehumanizing and radically simplistic?

Governments will use propaganda; fair enough. Still, this stuff isn't coming from the government. This is our free, fair, objective media talking. It strikes me as unforgivably shoddy journalism. It leaves me wondering where I can go for a picture of the world that doesn't try to reduce its complexities or shove pre-formed conclusions down my throat. Ironic (but satisfying) that once again, in search of complex truths, I turn to fiction.