The Stories We Tell

The story of the Naked Emperor is one of the most powerful stories we have because it is about the nakedness of our fictions, it is a story about the stories we tell, stories so widely accepted that they make the most naked lies possible. Our bookstores and libraries have fiction and non-fiction sections, tightly delineating the difference between the two, and while it is polite to admire the authors in the fiction section for their inventive storytelling, it is riskier to go up to a New York Times journalist and compliment him for the same thing. But it is riskiest of all to treat a story that the media is telling us as nothing but a story. That is something Stephanie Eisner, a cartoonist at the Daily Texan, a student newspaper at the University of Texas discovered, when she drew a little cartoon which depicted the Trayvon Martin case as a simplistic story being told by a maternal tabloid media to a gullible child. Accuse the storytellers of telling stories and they fight back with a story aimed at you.

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