File And Forget? Forget It!* By Cameron Duodu

(*Based on an article in New African, Dec 2009)
The Internet is great but it cannot tell a truth from a lie ... and they say everything posted on a website is stored on the Internet for ever! What can we do about it then?

One of the funniest pieces by that great American cartoonist and man of letters, James Thurber, is entitled "File and Forget". (By the way, it was Thurber who also gave us such titillating classic pieces of belles lettres as "The Beast In Me And Other Animals” and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". If you want a good, deep-throated laugh, look for these stories and many of those by Thurber that are --alas, like so many excellent books that publishers don't think will “sell” -- now probably out of print.)

I remember Thurber best for a New Yorker cartoon in which a man is sitting comfortably, with his feet up, reading his newspaper, while his wife sits disconsolately in a corner. The caption is "With you, I have found peace, and now you say you are leaving me." My late wife and I laughed over it permanently -- whenever she was angry with me, I would go to her, put an arm around her, and say, “With you I have found pace, and now you are angry with me!” It never failed to dissolve her annoyance. She would mutter, “Tchah!” as if to say, “So you think you can pull hat trick again?” But slowly, the cartoon would take form in her mind, like a photograph slowly making its appearance through the workings of a photographer's developer, and a small smile would appear at the corners of her mouth. And that would be it.

Actually the cartoon can hardly be bettered as an observation of how most marriages decay. The man, now cared for properly in the stomach area

-- and most probably, in the region beneath the stomach also -- soon becomes a slouch, only interested in his own entertainment (usually drink) and the companionship of his male friends) while his wife is left to fend for herself. Yet if she so much as mutters discontent, he would make it appear as if she is the most ungrateful human being in the world, as well as the one who possesses the least understanding. “My wife does not understand me,” he would tell everyone who was willing to listen. Especially other women whom he wanted to bed but who had qualms about sleeping with another woman's husband.

Although I've read quite a bit of Thurber's work, I came across "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by accident. I was teaching creative writing at the Ghana Institute of Journalism when some bold students -- almost rudely -- asked me to stop talking about the subject I had selected and take them through a short story their English teacher had asked them to write about.

Now, it is not done for a teacher of good conscience to "poach" the subject set by other teachers. But the students confessed: "We can't make head or tail of the story the American teacher has asked us to write about, Sir,"

With that, I realised the students were rally in a bind. The American teacher had obviously encountered a cultural roadblock, but none of the students had enough courage to tell her, and we were a disparate bunch of lecturers who came, did our thing and left - even if we were inclined to pass on hints we had gathered about how the students viewed us, there wasn't even a common room where we could sit and chat and possibly do the passing on. In fact, I had only seen the American lady teacher on the compound a few times, but had never exchanged a single word with her -- not even a greeting.

Well, a good appeal by one's fellow countrymen… and the marks the students obtained in their final exam would be partly depend on how well they did in that exercise. C'mon, off into the dustbin went the teacher's unwritten code. Like one of King Arthur's Knights of the Roundtable, I rode to their rescue: “Okay okay, what is it?” I did look guiltily around the compound when I said this.

They gave me a book of collected short stories, in which in which Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty nestled cosily, making life hell for the kids. It was the method Thurber had chosen for writing this story that had thrown them into confusion. The story is about a young man used to daydreaming. He would be doing something prosaic, say, walking past a string of shops on his way to buy sandwiches for his bosses, when his mind would suddenly do a rewind and put him into a much more interesting scene, like match of American football, in which he��would become the hero by running deftly past four, then five, then - most audaciously feigning to the left but running to the right - past a sixth man built like a mountain, to score a goal, or as they say in American football, "touchdown".

The next moment, the guy was entering a shop, only to discover that he had entered the wrong shop and that they didn't sell sandwiches at all there but tarpaulins. Or whatever. You get the picture.

The technique employed by Thurber, which made the story amazingly funny, was that he didn't demarcate any lines between the reality show and the daydreaming scenes summoned by mental video, and this sudden inter-cutting was what was confusing the students. And Thurber was doing it even better than James Joyce had done with his stream of consciousness episodes in Ulysses, in that whereas Joyce's writing was always dense, in Thurber's hand, the technique became a seamless description of everyday things.

Once I had alerted them to the technique and had made them laugh by pointing the incongruity of mistaking a tarpaulin shop for a café that sold sandwiches, as Walter Mitty Esquire was wont to do, it was plain sailing for them.

Afterwards, I was somewhat disconcerted to hear from the boyfriend of one of the most beautiful girls in the class that I was her "favourite teacher". I swore under my breath and said to myself: "Why the hell didn't she tell me she fancied me herself but chose the most unsuitable medium to let me know that? Obviously, she's now a no-go area!" I've often wondered what James Thurber would have made of that incident.

“Hallo, how are you today? … So is that what you are like? … If you have something to say to someone, you can't tell it to him yourself but you must go and tell somebody else? … Which somebody else? …We both know which somebody else! Don't pretend you don't know!… What did you tell him? Why, am I there when you are exchanging confidences with him? … You are the one who knows…” You see where Thurber could take that, don't you?

But right now, I want to limit myself to a discussion of another story of Thurber's entitled"File and Forget". In it, he had the simple task - as it seemed to him - of ordering a book by post from a well-known bookstore. He enclosed the bookstore's own declared amount of postage, plus the full book price, and waited. A letter came in due course. It thanked him for his order and said he had forgotten to put money with the order and could he send the money by return of post.

Thurber wrote back to say that he had included payment with his letter. Not only for the cost of the book but also for the postage!

They wrote back to say that they had traced his payment. But he should end money for the postage.

He looked for the counterfoil of his money order and he was about to enclose it in his reply to show that he had paid for both book and postage, when something told him that he should make a copy of it, because the way things were gong, they would claim he hadn't said the counterfoil and then he would have nothing at all to show that he had sent the counterfoil to them. So he sent them a copy of the counterfoil. They wrote to thank him for it and said the book was being posted to him that day.

But they posted the book but to his neighbour's address. Plus it was the wrong book ... How was he to get them to take the wrong book back and send him the correct book to the right address? I swear, if you read the whole sequence of letters exchanged, you will fall off your chair laughing.

I thought about File and Forget when I read about a book, just published in the USA, which made me wonder the mirror of errors Thurber wrote about could exist in this age of computers. The book is entitled "Delete.? The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger (Princeton University Press). The writer points out that not only do computers remember everything but because of the powerful "search engines" that rule the Internet today, everything written that gets posted on a website is stored on the Internetfor ever. For instance, if something one did in one's youth as a prank gets posted on the Internet, whenever one's name is "searched", the incident will be there. In perpetuity!

I know from personal experience that what he says is absolutely true. For I found my name associated with a lie that was published about me in the Report of the Ghana National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), published in 2004. In Volume 4 Chapter 3 Paragraph 2.7.6, appears the following statement:

"On 14th December 1967. the NLC (National Liberation Council) caused the dismissal of four editors, three of whom worked for the state-owned press... Their crime was criticising the Abbot Laboratory (a US pharmaceutical company) Agreement with the NLC regime. A new editor for the Daily Graphic, Cameron Duodu, was appointed... He was also later to be dismissed, ironically, by the civilian Progress Party government, for criticising Dr. [Kofi] Busia's policy of 'dialogue with South Africa'."

It reads like an excellent illustration of what the Greeks call nemesis. Cameron Duodu who claims to be in favour of freedom of the press had taken an appointment as editor of theDaily Graphic, when the editor, whom he probably would have condemned as supine, had dared to criticise the NLC Government and had been sacked. Where were Cameron Duodu's much-vaunted principles?

I can see the guy smiling and patting himself complacently, “I've shown what a hypocrite Cameron Duodu is, haven't I?”

Except that whoever wrote this for the NRC had completely stood history on its head! I was appointed editor of the Daily Graphic in 1970 and not in 1967 - three whole years later. So the impression given in the Report that I had profited from the dismissal of a number of courageous editors by accepting an appointment from the government that had dismissed them, is totally and cruelly false. But it's there on the Internet! There is no way I can alter the falsehood, unless the whole part about me -- or probably the whole report -- is taken down!

Whoever wrote that paragraph for the Commission is one of those pusillanimous characters who hide behind anonymity to libel others and rob them of their good name. Not only was the passage malicious but it is one of the most telling examples of the laziness that afflict most of our so-called journalists and academics alike. The passage occurs in a long description of the political situation in Ghana since independence, which serves as a background to the situation which led to the events recounted before the National Reconciliation Commission. The section on the press is therefore part of hat might be called the preamble to the Commission's Report. Yet someone entrusted with the task of writing such an important piece had been too lazy to check his facts, and by his laziness, had perpetrated a monstrous lie against my poor self. I know for a fact that the Daily Graphickeeps bound copies of its editions in its library, and on the back page, the name of the editor is always to be found. That is required by law. So even if the current management of the paper could not --give him the date of my appointment, he could have ascertained it for himself by simply looking up the name of the person whose name appeared as editor immediately after the sacking of the editor in December 1967. Thus, it was sheer laziness, and probably not malice, that caused this error.

When l found out about the inaccuracy, I complained to a friend of mine, a former employee of the Commission. He told me that since the Commission had been disbanded, the only person who could cause the error to be corrected was the chairman of the Commission, Mr Justice Amuah-Sekyi. But before I could write to the eminent judge, he expired. My only option is to complain to the deputy chairman of the Commission, Brigadier Emmanuel Erskine. But even if I'm able to trace him, can he technically correct the information in the Report, at this late stage?

The bitter but funny thing about this story is that I did feature in the episode of the dismissal of the editors, but not in the bad light in which the Report paints me. It was rather the exact opposite that actually happened. The fact is that before the editors were dismissed, I wasasked by the press officer of the NLC, Mr C. C. Lokko, to come and see him. When I went to the Castle (the seat of government) to see him, he didn't tell me anything but took me --mysteriously -- straight to the office of the most powerful civil servant in the country, the Secretary to the Cabinet (a Mr Apaloo) and left me with him!

Mr Apaloo did not tell me anything about editors being sacked, but most cleverly asked me whether I would like to become the editor of the Daily Graphic. Now, I had been criticising the standards of the media in Ghana for years, and had exchanged words with the Supervising Editor of the Graphic, Kodzo Dumoga, over an instance when the words, “LATE NEWS”, appeared on the front page of the Graphic upside down! So I anted an opportunity to show what a good newspaper should be lie in Ghana and Mr Apaloo's words were like music to my ears. Would I like to be editor of the Daily Graphic? Of course I would. And so I said yes, I would love to be editor of the paper.

But I am blessed with a certain amount of instinctive prescience -- call it what you will -- and this unknown “something” made me add: "I must tell you, Sir: if there is a conflict between the government's interest and the public interest, I shall go with the public interest." Mr Apaloo quietly thanked me and rose from his eat to bid me goodbye. I left. I never heard from either Mr Apaloo or Mr Lokko again!

And then the storm about the NLC's dismissal of the three editors over the Abbott Laboratories controversy broke. Gee! I realised how lucky I had been in telling Mr Apaloo exactly what I would do in case such a conflict had broken out between the government and the editors. Had my appointment been announced before I realised the true circumstances under which it had been made

--the peremptory dismissal of three editors who had dared to criticise an agreement the Government had signed with a foreign company -- I would never have been able to live it down. For no-one would have believed that I did not know that the editor had been sacked when I took up the appointment, and the sacked editors would have become heroes, while I would have been deservingly cast as a villain in the public eye. Only my dedication to playing with a straight bat, and always to tell the truth to power, had saved me from public ignominy. But because I had never written about this -- believing, as I do, that modesty requires one not to cast oneself as virtuous, unless it is absolutely necessary to correct an untruth -- someone, without checking the true facts, had written a fictitious account to misrepresent the opposite of what had happened as the true version of events. And that was what was on the Internet. Permanently.

How absolutely, cruelly ironical. In the past, I could, of course, have filed it as one of the mishaps that occur in public life, and forgotten about it. But to file and forget in the computer age? Forget it.