The book is called Life in the Wrong Lane because that's where journalists live: in the one lane heading toward a catastrophe. Everyone who's normal is in the other lane, any other lane, going the other way. They're getting out. Although Dobbs's travels, first for ABC News and now for HDNet Television, have taken him to many troubled corners of the country and the world, Life in the Wrong Lane isn't a travel guide about exotic places or a contemporary history of the events he covered. Rather, it's about all the funny, bizarre, scary, stupid, dangerous, distasteful, unwise, and unbelievable things that journalists experience just getting to the point of reporting a story, experiences that possibly are even more interesting than the stories being covered, but which never become part of the stories they finally report to their audiences.
LIFE IN THE WRONG LANE
Why Journalists Go In When Everyone Else Wants OutBy GREG DOBBSiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Greg Dobbs
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-5276-4Contents
PREFACE Why funny, funky, scary, stupid, dangerous, distasteful, unwise, and unbelievable things journalistsexperience just getting to the point of reporting a story make for a good story......................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................................................................................................................................................xvTHE NIGHT I SURRENDERED TO A COW Wounded Knee, South Dakota......................................................................................................................................................1THE LIGHT AND BRIGHT SIDE OF AN EXECUTION Utah, and Eagle Pass, Texas............................................................................................................................................18EXCUSE ME, DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? Budapest, Hungary, and Moscow, USSR.............................................................................................................................................37TONIGHT THE SPHINX SAID, "SHUT UP" Cairo, Egypt, and the Libyan border...........................................................................................................................................50CHAMPAGNE FROM A STYROFOAM CUP Tehran, Iran......................................................................................................................................................................64HOW WOULD I LIKE TO WHAT? Kampala, Uganda, and across the border in Kenya........................................................................................................................................86"WELCOME TO MY COUNTRY," BUT NOT FOR LONG! Kabul, Afghanistan....................................................................................................................................................97IS IT QADHAFI? OR QADDAFI? KADDAFI? GADHAFI? DOESN'T MATTER, IT'S FOR TELEVISION Tripoli, Libya..................................................................................................................112THIS IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION? Belfast, Northern Ireland..........................................................................................................................................................125A FISTFUL OF ZLOTYS Warsaw, Poland, and the train tracks leading in.............................................................................................................................................135I WAS ONLY DRIVING AN AMBULANCE ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT Tripoli, Libya, and Beirut, Lebanon.........................................................................................................................149MINT CONDITION ... UNTIL TOMORROW Sana'a, Yemen, and the remote south of the north. And Italy before that........................................................................................................164THIS MAY NOT BE HELL, BUT WE CAN SEE IT FROM HERE Saudi Arabia, the Kuwait border, and Amman, Jordan.............................................................................................................175THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED Budapest, Hungary; Khartoum, Sudan; Fez, Morocco......................................................................................................................................189INDEX.............................................................................................................................................................................................................207
Chapter One
THE NIGHT I SURRENDERED TO A COW
Wounded Knee, South Dakota
Wounded Knee once was known only as a creek in the state of South Dakota. That's all it was, a creek, where approximately 350 Sioux Indians, led by Chief Big Foot, were taken by the United States cavalry in December, 1890, ostensibly just to be disarmed. But after turning in their arms, an estimated three hundred of the Indians-men, women, and children, including Big Foot-were shot dead by the cavalry's smoky carbines and one-shell-a-second Hotchkiss guns. Wounded Knee became a symbol of the white man's systematic destruction of the proud and independent Indian nation. It was considered, in fact, the last fatal blow.
After that, the Indian nation was confined to Indian reservations. That doesn't mean Indians couldn't leave their reservations. It just means that if they wanted to live like Indians, and try to exploit whatever small rewards they were granted in the treaties they signed, they could do it only on the reservations.
Reservation life, however, was limited. For the most part, the tracts of land Washington designated for Indians were among America's worst. Most of them suffered harsh climates and contained few useful resources (until someone dreamed up the idea of building casinos!. Furthermore, the reservations were administered by Washington, which put the white hand of the U.S. government on almost every Indian affair, from the writing of local laws to the provision of children's education to the leasing of the best land to outside interests.
Those leases, for valuable assets on Indian lands like oil and natural gas, were overseen for more than a century by the Interior Department and known as "The Indian Trust." But there was little if any real trust at all. Underpaid for and rarely consulted about their property, Indians finally fought back but not on the plains. They fought back in court, leading in the late 1990s to a multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit against the government, the biggest lawsuit in U.S. history.
The historic sense of abuse was what stimulated the creation of the American Indian Movement, better known simply as AIM. AIM sought to take control of Indian country from the hands of bureaucrats in Washington and put it into the hands of Indians on reservations. Its militant members wanted more Indian culture reflected in the laws that govern them, the schools that teach them, and the use of the land that supports them.
By 1973, Wounded Knee itself was a tourist trading post. An old wooden church, a general store, and a post office. Tourists traveling across South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation could drive through the rolling hills where the last major Indian massacre took place, and stop for a postcard and a Coke. That's about all there was. But because there was anything there at all, the American Indian Movement chose Wounded Knee as the site of its biggest public protest. In February that year, several hundred militants took over the few trailers and buildings that constituted the trading post and began a seventy-one-day standoff against the United States government. At the end, both sides claimed victory. Practically speaking, neither side won a thing.
* * *
The embarrassing thing was, we probably should have seen it coming.
Our five-man news team had just spent four days on the Pine Ridge Reservation recording the Indians' complaints. We were shown the signs of corruption. We saw the extent of poverty. We interviewed Russell Means and Dennis Banks, the angry and outspoken leaders of the American Indian Movement. "We're going to change things around here, we're going to do it soon, and we're not going to give up until we've gotten rid of Uncle Sam," Banks told us.
We probably should...
