{"id":13195,"date":"2012-01-22T12:28:26","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13195"},"modified":"2012-01-22T12:29:12","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:29:12","slug":"transitioning-from-shithole-specialist-to-ordinary-journalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/22\/transitioning-from-shithole-specialist-to-ordinary-journalist\/","title":{"rendered":"Transitioning from “shithole specialist” to ordinary journalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke<\/a>, have to cope with wrenching career changes:<\/p>\n

\n

After the Iraq War I gave up on being what\u2019s known in the trade as a \u201cshithole specialist.\u201d I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I\u2019d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn\u2019t much happy or cute about Iraq.<\/p>\n

Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic<\/em>, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an \u201cimbed\u201d with the Third Infantry Division, I as a \u201cunilateral.\u201d We thought, once ground operations began, I\u2019d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, \u201cI\u2019m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you\u2019re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya<\/em> contests.\u201d Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don\u2019t seem to own any fun out\ufb01ts. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. \u201cHalt!\u201d say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.<\/p>\n

I say, \u201cObserve that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are courteously allowing you to proceed now,\u201d they reply.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t work worth a damn with the TSA.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he\u2019s had. Personally — and I\u2019m sure I\u2019m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It\u2019s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I\u2019m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I\u2019m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I\u2019m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes: After the Iraq War I gave up on being what\u2019s known in the trade as a \u201cshithole specialist.\u201d I was too old to be scared stiff and too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28,370],"tags":[333,202,134],"class_list":["post-13195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","category-middle-east","tag-iraq","tag-travel","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3qP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13198,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13195\/revisions\/13198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}