Fooling with the Amish by Eitzen Dirk;

Author:Eitzen, Dirk;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bird takes pains to distinguish this sort of playful engagement from an ironic, disengaged, smarter-than-thou stance. I know a professor who used to hang Weekly World News covers in his office as a joke and, I suppose, as a sign of his postmodern sophistication. He appreciated the tabloid from above, one might say. Bird found this attitude to be common among academics and literary types but totally uncharacteristic of regular readers and fans of the tabloids. Rather than scoffing at the stories, regular readers ate them up. “It’s like waiting for each paper like a juicy steak dinner,” one reported.25 Instead of regarding the stories as silly parodies, fans read them as fascinating hypotheticals. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Hillary really did have an alien lover? Do you think there really are extraterrestrials on earth? Do you suppose they ever have sex with humans? Since most tabloid stories are far more plausible than Hillary’s alien lover, the possibilities they describe are more interesting still. How about the woman who had titanium high heels surgically implanted, for example? Or the twenty-four-year-old woman who sued her parents for making her clean up her room as a teen? And what about those prophecies of Nostradamus that seem to be on the verge of coming true?

What makes tabloids fun for fans, Bird concludes, is that, like ghost stories and urban legends, they present possible realities that are fun to speculate about. They are a print version of the kinds of tall tale, folkloric legend, and gossip that used to be shared around the campfire. As such, what they trade on is not believability but several other social ingredients. First, they need to be edgy or out of the ordinary in some way—sensational, if you will. They need to test the boundaries of what is possible or socially acceptable or both, like Hillary and her alien lover. Second, they need to deal with well-known people, themes, or tropes, like political sex scandals, alien probes, and the Clintons. Third, they need to convey the impression of conferring some special knowledge—intimate secrets, inside dope, scoops, new scientific revelations, and the like. These three features—edginess, familiarity, and special knowledge—are what connect the tabloids’ stories of the bizarre and paranormal, like space aliens, with plain old celebrity gossip, like the details about Lisa Marie Presley’s latest divorce. That explains why many of Bird’s informants enjoyed the two kinds of story almost interchangeably.

It is interesting to recall here, from the first chapter, Lebanon Levi’s description of Amish women sitting around gossiping. “Did you hear?” says one. “Rebecca’s boy got a barbershop haircut!” “That’s so terrible!” another responds. “I feel just terrible for his mother. Unless she condoned it. You don’t think she condoned it, do you?”26 This example shows edginess (the social violation of a barbershop haircut), familiarity (Rebecca is a mutual acquaintance), and special knowledge (“Did you hear . . . ?”). It also shares one other important ingredient with the stories in the supermarket tabloids: speculation (“You don’t

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