Drocca said:
What purpose did it serve to out the designer? Why couldn't he have made it clear that Dr. V's credentials were bullshit but that he wanted to focus on the club?
I agree that he has a better story by doing what he did. Maybe that's all that matters. I'm having a difficult time arguing for, or even fully articulating, my position so it's probably the case that I'm out of my element here.
Just read this. Link is here, btw:
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-physicist-golf-club-dr-v/
Completely agree with you, Drocca. This was a mean, technically correct attention grab by a petty person whose intial story - new golf putter challenges long held beliefs - would have been clickable by golf people and a few others but whose discovery of lies about the creators background was so exciting. For everything I disliked about it the thing I disliked the most was that in reading it and talking about it here I was helping further promote this hack's work. If I'd read this and there wasn't an ongoing discussion I'd not have posted but the interesting conversation here between you and Rip was enough to make me want to just add support to you.
The sentence that really broke it for me was this one below, right in the conclusion. I knew 'Dr V' committed suicide because you referenced it but if reading blind, you wouldn't know that part yet:
"Although there were times when I had been genuinely thrilled with the revelation that Dr. V’s official narrative didn’t line up with reality, there was nothing satisfying about where the story had ended up."
It's the crux of the article. Hack journalist is writing ho-hum procedural and stumbles on something he knows is more juicy. Genuinely thrilled. As in, 'how fucking awesome is this, I've caught this freak in the act!'.
In mainstream journalism, suicide and self-harm is considered off-limits and in some parts is actually illegal unless it passes what's known as the public interest test, in that it's news to report on the suicide of a celebrity but you never write about people who jump off buildings or throw themselves into the path of trains etc, and it's usually pretty closely stuck to. This is one of those cases where it's worth examining whether this was really a public interest case for one, considering no one had ever heard of this person until Hannan made them a public entity, and that's very debatable because it's usually an issue with non actual celebrity suicides, so fine whatever. Of course, it's very rare for any of the big big suicides to be described in such minute detail as Hannan does here. Bag on head, suicide note, first-responder speculation presented in quotes as if that is in any fucking way relevant... it's ghoulish.
But for me the real kicker is in the great reveal. JimBoSox rationalised that part above by saying it was published posthumously but that doesn't make any sense. This story was getting published anyway. Hannan had no way of knowing (besides the fact the person he was about to destroy was clearly mentally vulnerable) 'Dr V' was about to end her life so the idea he held on to some obligatory timeline is logically defunct. So there's that, but it's worse for me because through the way Hannan clumsily continues to insert himself throughout the article allied to that quote above, and the one where he describes tackling how to write about the death by showing absolutely zero remorse, sympathy or tact and bringing it back to his own journalistic troubles and insulting the dead person one more time by saying:
Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.
It's tough to be a gangster journalist. So hard to write about a person who killed themself when they didn't like you. I'm actually pretty fucking confident Hannan not only did not feel any remorse for 'Dr V', I'd be willing to bet he was actually, in some way, 'Genuinely thrilled' she was dead. It was the perfect way to end his hackjob.
Two things - one, I'm pretty personally sickened by the way Hannan treated 'Dr V's' personal life choice as (based on what's written) a TG person. There are story merits to that which go towards the background being fake, but Hannan revels in it:
"She filed a “petition for change of name” on October 14, 2003, in the Pierce County, Washington, District Court. She scratched out an unsuccessful first attempt at writing “Essay” on that petition. She wrote “OLD NAME DOES NOT MATCH ME” where the court paperwork asked why she no longer wanted to be known as Stephen Krol. She worked as general manager at Trax Bar and Grill, an LGBT bar in Kent, Washington. She was the subject of three separate harassment claims from her time there, including one from a male coworker who said she made “inappropriate comments about her breasts and genitalia.” "
"Before I told him about her past, he told me that because of her height and vivid red hair, it was hard to miss the “pretty woman walking toward me in a miniskirt.”)"
"Maybe the most surprising thing about my conversation with Kinney was how calmly he took the news that the woman he thought was an aerospace engineer had once been a man, and a mechanic."
The first quote - completely unneccesary and only in the story to really ram that shit home... this dude is fucked up, what a freak! The second quote - completely fucking irrelevant aside. Continues to really drive home this point about how duplicitous Dr V is personally. If left out of the story, the only thing that changes is we are presented with less of a reason to mistrust Dr V for living a lie, as seen by Hannan. The third quote - remove the word 'a man' and it reads .... an aerospace engineer had once been a mechanic. That is relevant and serves Hannan's purported reason for writing this story. The TG bit, rammed home repeatedly, is just one more shot by the journalist to really show the basic lying nature of his subject.
There is a story here, of course - Rip says there is a story about diligence and story and he's right. But that's 'right' on a base level. This article is galling to me and I think to Drocca because it has a story and doesn't tell it basically. It instead becomes viciously personal and ghoulishly delights in the ending. One final bit on this little essay that might well be the part which makes me people upset but here's this:
One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. Yet despite all that, the main emotion I felt while reading her desperate, last-ditch email was sadness.
Sadness. Genuine, empathy, huh? Sadness. For a person and couple who had called to plead with Hannan to leave them alone. He writes that he recorded everything they said but it was so hard, like a wind tunnel. I mean, we really are confronted by these words to see Dr V and her partner as crazy, aggressive assholes. But there's not enough sadness in Hannan to leave Dr V alone. Nope, he's got a thrilling story about a man who became a woman and lied about a background to a whole bunch of people.
Dr V was clearly fucked up. Hannan himself reported - in ghoulish detail, right down to the suicide note - on her previous suicide attempt. For months he spoke with her, recording her side of conversations, all of them, and writing up the juiciest things she said to him in this article totally devoid of context and secure in the knowledge not a single thing he said would ever be presented in a similar fashion or on such a platform as Grantland who draw a fair amount of audience whose views on the LGBTQI community would be, I think, unsympathetic. And the best fucking thing he could come up with when it came to presenting a fucking threat was
you have no idea what I have done and what I can do.
Hannan's a hack. He clearly has no actual idea about what he has done and what the power of journalism can do to people, especially the self-harming depressed people.
Dr V was going to kill herself, maybe, regardless of this article. But the months of mental anguish this journalist subjected her to absolutely played a part in increasing those self harm thoughts and I think the least Hannan could have done was to bury this fucking hackjob in the open grave in his backyard where he keeps his ethics.