The American Spectator

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So Stephanie and I are "successful writers," so to speak. We live in a small apartment house that is kind of a college dormitory. The kids upstairs, all in their twenties, have no visible means of income, party all day and drive a Mercedes van. We drive a ten-year-old Dodge Challenger. When we tell them we are writers -- that Stephanie blogs every other day in the London Telegraph, that I write for a magazine in Washington called The American Spectator -- they look at us askance and say to themselves, "Are these people for real? If they're such great writers, what are they doing here?"

So why do we do it? I want to answer that question by recounting a story from Stephanie's book, The Other War, about press coverage in Israel and Palestine. In order to research this book, Stephanie put on a flowery dress and a big sun hat and spent weeks wandering all by herself on the West Bank in the midst of some of the fighting. She dressed that because there are dozens of rich European women wandering the West Bank looking for sympathetic stories or handing out foundation money and she wanted to look like one of them.

She did have a Palestinian driver and he showed her around and translated for her. At one point he said, "Why don't you meet my friend? He owns a coffee shop." So she wandered into this coffee shop in the midst of many suspicious eyes and sat down to talk to him. "You're an American?" he began. "We know all Americans hate the Palestinians? Why do you hate the Palestinians? Can you tell me that?'

"I'm not sure what you mean," she said very slowly. "Why do you say all Americans hate the Palestinians?"

"Because you come all the way over here to get rid of Saddam Hussein but you won't get rid of Yasser Arafat!" he exploded.

And all of a sudden, there it was. Everybody on the West Bank knew Yasser Arafat was a crook and was stealing money and rewarding his friends and squirreling the rest away in Switzerland, but because of the press interpretation of the situation, nobody outside knew this. She says she had a half-hour intense discussion with him in which they agreed on almost everything and she practically walked out of the café in tears.

And that's why we do it. Because we like to be on the cutting edge of history. Because we like to throw our bodies out there and find out what's really happening in the world. Because we like to do people's thinking for them and be their eyes and ears and discover things that nobody has ever seen before or recognized and put it in print somewhere so we can say, "I was the one who found that out first. I got that story."

It's more fun than being rich. I've heard writers say, "It's more fun than being President." And so as you go around the room tonight shaking hands with the writers and matching up the face with that name you've been reading in the magazine all these years, remember, no matter how ill their clothes may fit them, no matter how much more frazzled they may look than you always imagined -- they're having fun, too!