Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson

Author:Chuck Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2007-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

You don’t move to Dallas for fun or the kind of money they were paying me. Unless you were born to it, Dallas is impossible to appreciate. The city embodies the worst of L.A. (vanity-plate car culture, general lack of personal integrity, smog, fake tits) without any of the redeeming parts (the beach, nice weather, nine NBA titles, classic Randy Newman theme song).

At this point it’s imperative to note a significant distinction between “Dallas” and “Texas.” For understandable reasons, non-Texans have a tendency to lump the two together. This is unfair to Texas. In the same way that Anchorage has very little to do with the Alaska of popular imagination5 and New York City is considered a foreign country by many residents of its state, Dallas is largely a city of carpetbaggers and ambitious hacks who have nothing in common with the state’s cow punchers, country outlaws, and salt-of-the-earth types who enunciate all three syllables and pronounce the h in words like “vehicle.” On those occasions that I got out of Dallas and made it to Texas, I actually had a pretty good time, despite the truly odious politics that prevail there.

What I wanted out of the Travelocity deal was the chance to apply the lessons of my years of travel to correct what I saw as the travel-writing racket’s multitude of shortcomings. Apparently I wanted this badly enough to move to Dallas for a second time.

I’d gotten my first daily exposure to these failings in the mid-1990s in Dallas as an editor for American Way, the venerable in-flight magazine—well, the first one, anyway—put out by American Airlines. In the publishing industry and by the public at large, in-flight magazines and other “custom publications” aren’t considered “real” magazines. This is due to the fact that their primary purpose is neither to entertain nor edify readers but to blatantly represent the interests of the corporate entity that sponsors them. This may be true, but it’s only the blatant part of the equation that separates in-flight magazines from the ones you buy on the newsstand. As with Third World cops, the “corruption” of in-flight magazines is simply more transparent than that of their otherworld brethren.

Almost all magazines exist for a single purpose—to move product, or, less artfully, to sell shit. Introduce consumers to new products. Put them in a buying mood. As conditioned purveyors of the sell-sell-sell mentality, magazine editors routinely dismiss story ideas if something new to sell can’t be attached to them. This limp editorial practice prevents thousands of good stories each year from seeing print and reinforces the contemporary magazine’s standing as a cleverly concealed catalog. It doesn’t matter if they’re peddling lipstick, financial services, movies, or hotel rooms. Cosmopolitan sells L’Oreal and Entertainment Weekly sells Warner Bros. the same way Delta Sky sells Delta Airlines. Delta Sky’s just more open about it.

Perfect example: Spend five minutes with Sports Illustrated and you’ll find that the cross-pollination of commodities like Gatorade, the NFL, and any number of steroid-chomping jocks makes many editorial and advertising pages virtually interchangeable.

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