The Secret Life of John Schmid
The pseudonymous author stands on shaky ground indeed in the straight-arrow fellowship of journalistic scriveners. The Reader’s own policy on pseudonyms is clear and unnegotiable: only when appropriate.
Tracy Baim thought the whole thing was pretty funny. “He started out as a straight woman,” she said, speaking of Schmid and the formidable Mrs. Walls. “It was done very tongue in cheek, obviously a pseudonym for somebody.”
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By no means a master of deceit, Schmid reserved theater tickets for Nightlines under his own name. Soon rumors of duplicity reached Gay Chicago, and Karlin began making what he calls “discreet inquiries.” Schmid’s downfall was his review of A Lullaby of Murder at Tommy Gun’s Garage, a dinner theater. Panning the evening for Gay Chicago, Schmid described his steak arriving with long slivers of wood buried within. Writing for Nightlines, gourmet columnist M.J. Hochberg told the same story but, alas, assigned the skewered meat to her dinner companion, the by now self-realized and amicably divorced Diane Levy.
Schmid will now write for Nightlines under his own name, and Tracy Baim feels better for that. She was never totally comfortable having a male ghostwrite a lesbian sensibility. In fact, she’d decided to retire the Diane Levy byline regardless and send Schmid out in masculine disguise. “They were leaning toward Leslie Waters,” says Schmid, “but that sounds like a pseudonym.”
The latest issues of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Extra! (published by the liberal watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) arrived at our desk together. Each dwells on ways in which the media skewed the war as they described it.
The editor of Extra!, Jim Naureckas, observed reporters reducing the war to the elements of “us” versus “him”—the “us” binding the journalist to the American forces and cause, the “him” being the demon Hussein. “Journalists constantly asked, ‘How long will it take to defeat Saddam Hussein?’ or “How badly are we hurting him?’ as if wars are fought against single individuals, rather than nations.”
These are weapons of wholesale death, a concept reporters weren’t eager to explore. “Again and again,” says Naureckas, “the mantra of ‘surgical strikes against military targets’ was repeated by journalists, even though Pentagon briefers acknowledged that they were aiming at civilian roads, bridges and public utilities vital to the survival of the civilian population … . The U.S. media’s most effective—and offensive—tool for dismissing civilian casualties was to treat the whole issue as a propaganda ploy on the part of Saddam Hussein. As Bruce Morton commented: “If Saddam Hussein can turn the world against the effort, convince the world that women and children are the targets of the air campaign, then he will have won a battle, his only one so far.”
