Mucking Around With Mitford

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty" - Jessica Mitford

I must admit that today's political climate (and the exposure of Hollywood's sexual abuse "open secrets") has reinvigorated my love for investigative journalism.

For a time, the media seemed to allow one of its cornerstone mediums to sit on a shelf and collect dust as a new form of communication sashayed its way in. That new, sexy moll was the quicksilver truth serum known as social media. As it caught on, it became the fastest, most effortless way to compartmentalize and digest news, and it gave us a gift in return as it stoked our need for instant gratification and affinity by way of shares and likes.

Not that there is anything wrong with seeing those little hearts light up or wanting to nosh on your news in bite-sized tweets, videos, and memes --- I too enjoy the zip n' zeal of Samantha Bee's half-hour, hunkering down in forums of interest, and getting my point across in less than 140 characters (or is it 280 now?) --- but with the good comes the bad, and with every push towards progress, "clickbait" and "fake news" were bred as journalism's unfortunate new reckless onuses.

Instead of safeguarding how we share and report news I hate to say that journalists slept at the wheel. It often pained me to see falsities not taken to task, opinions weren't constructive but an exercise in ignorance and assholery, where we seemed closer to an Orwellian' "doublespeak" vocabulary that backed people into corners, and bred a sense of classist and racist entitlement. With such a breakdown of ethics, a laziness towards protecting the fourth estate was inevitable, and why I shouldn't have been surprised at the media's contribution to the rise of the walking bowel movement that is currently residing in the White House.

News isn't supposed to be glamorous, but it isn't supposed to erroneous either. It's to give voice to voiceless, not turn the volume up on those who are already screaming. Now we're getting a brisk, frigid shower wake-up to why you can't have it both ways, that you can't refashion the news just because the outcome doesn't suit you. Such distraction and ill-informed tactics do in fact dumb down a sizable portion of the population, and make it easier for propaganda-driven media conglomerates and cyber warfare to slink in.

Not only that, it allowed people to forget that fact checking, interviewing, extensive research, and the exhaustive and meticulous organization of such matter are elements that are essential for journalism and its assembly, and that all these elements work to expose and bring down corruption. It's bad enough with the current Fool In Chief we are gaslighted into believing that facts, realities, and just literal common sense are figments of the imagination, but for someone who came of age during drastic shifts in media --- where the Internet pretty much changed everything --- it was obvious to me that journalism took a hit, and began to dissent into fallacy and well, fuckery.

Time will tell if we're witnessing an All The President’s Men on steroids moment, where careers will be made (and others will crash and burn) and where we stop trying to legitimize talking heads and web darlings as "journalists". American journalism at current, to me, continues to be in a state of flux. It still wants to flirt with the loudest foghorn in the room, all while not checking any balances, but if there is anything  positive that has come out of the current presidential shitshow, the fourth estate --- the art of hunting and gathering, reporting and being forceful in corralling answers to inform the masses --- got its groove back and proved it wasn't totally knocked out by emojis and snapchats.

This new era of journalism was in the back of my mind while reading Poison Penmanship last year, and reworking this review for this year. I wondered what its author, the late Jessica Mitford would've thought of the "alternative facts" clusterfuck that became American journalism. What would she have thought of the Liar In Chief?  The infiltration of the fake news she so often rallied against in her hey-day? What response she'd have if she'd heard the authoritarian bravado of former Press Secretary Sean Spicer when he said that we should "disagree with the facts"? Maybe I answered my own questions, because within the pages of this 1979 collection of Mitford's greatest hits (and misses) is an honest and fierce exploration of the world of investigative journalism, and a woman who reveled passionately in it to seek the unfiltered truth.


It's really a shame that all through journalism school Mitford’s name never popped up in lectures or discussions. I knew slightly of the Mitford sisters --- a sisterhood that could give the Kardashians a run for their money (I mean, what family do you know has a Fascist, a Communist, a Nazi sympathizer, and a Duchess all in one family?) ---- but did I know of Jessica aka the “Cool Communist One” who mucked and raked her way into the journalism world? Not a damn thing. I guess my journalism professors thought she was an "amateur" as journalist Carl Bernstein once claimed too.

Amateur or not, like Bernstein and his colleague Bob Woodward, Mitford also told the truth without being slant about it. She may not have brought down a presidency, but she too was brave, forceful, and active in making sure that the public didn't continue to rock those rose-colored glasses, and her efforts are well represented in Poison Penmanship.

I was drawn to this book by way of another, Caitlin Doughty's excellent memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. In it Doughty spent some pages discussing Mitford's infamous expose of the death industry (1963's The American Way of Death), and how its revelations changed, and at turns harmed it financially. I was intrigued and wanted more, but instead of picking up that particular book I went with this one, considering I had already had my fill of "death" tomes, and that one of the essays here ("Americans Don't Want Fancy Funerals") led Mitford to write American Way, and two others chronicled the public response to her putting the death industry on blast ("My Way Of Life Since The American Way Of Death" and "Something To Offend Everyone"). Plus, as someone who loved her investigative journalism class during undergrad, I always love when truth tea is brewed, so this book was calling my name.

Getting to know Mitford (or Decca as she was most known) through her writing has me in full worship mode. I really gravitated towards it, as it's clear and concise, evoking the grassroots spirit of her activism while being linguistically sound. It also strays from being pretentious or navel-gazing (two literary pet-peeves of mine), as even when she dwells into a topic that I have little to no interest in (an expose on a spa that cosmetic businesswoman, Elizabeth Arden devised for wealthy white women, for starts), she welcomes you into the fuss with her, uncovering and chuckling at the absurdity and making the event accessible to a plebeian reader like me.

Her other most famous expose is her piece for The Atlantic about the Famous Writer's School scam ("Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers"), and its a riveting read that led me to be disappointed with one of my favorite writers, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, and reminded me that possibly without Mitford raising awareness to such scams, we wouldn’t be as diligent as sniffing out snake oil slicks in the world of letters today.

Mitford was big on civil rights and a few pieces here reflect her diligence to the cause, with her interview with former Black Panther member, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family, George Jackson after the publication of his prison letters (1970's Soledad Brother) and her short-lived and controversial stint as a professor at San Jose State University where she started an on-campus protest are highlights. There's even a little low-brow humor, as I laughed all through Mitford shading the shit out of this New York City restaurant ("Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove"), and the follow-up article where the restaurant tried to put one over our minxy Mitford ("The Dove Strikes Back").

Yet the gem of them all for me was her expose on Southern race relations ("You All, Non-You All: A Southern Potpourri"). Reading as a field guide, Mitford focused on various Southern states and cities and the varying attitudes its citizens have in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the piece concluding with Mitford attending a mass meeting where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was to speak with the Freedom Riders, and where violence erupts. The whole piece just said so much about Southern whites and their mint julep-fueled attitudes towards racial injustice that even with its 1962 date stamp it felt penned as of yesterday.

What's even better about this collection is that it doubles as a book about the craft of journalism.

After each essay, Mitford leaves comments about how she came to write the piece, the difficulties she would run into throughout the course of writing and interviewing, as well as follow-up comments on what she would've done different, the editorial changes that were made, and some of the aftermath that came of her muckraking activities. Mitford is even brave enough to revisit earlier works, which as most writers know is a form of self-abuse. I found the inclusion of this so valuable and informative, as well as amusing. Often writing manuals can be quite redundant or writers become self-absorbed to where they forget the evolution of their craft, so it was great to get these insights as a budding "muckraker" myself.

If this was my world, Mitford would be alive n' kicking, still out there fighting the good fight, and possibly knocking back some drinks and trading wits with the likes of Rachel Maddow (talk about a sweet sweet fantasy, baby!). Still, I'm glad I live in a world of where a Maddow and a Mitford can co-exist in their eras and mediums, forever telling the truth, and never telling it slant.

from the margins

• Rating: *****
• 288 pages 
• First published 1979 // Published September 7, 2010 by NYRB Classics

• Jane Smiley writes the preface for the NYRB Classics and its quite the love letter to Mitford and her work.

• Mitford had a singing career on the side for shits n' kicks. She apparently opened for Cyndi Lauper at a gig, and sang a duet with another literary she-ro of mines, Maya Angelou! Girl-fucking-power.