"But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now."

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What should we do with the spaces we’re given? The ability to construct possible futures in the imagination, the ability to predict (within reason) the possible effects of our actions, is said to be one of the few fundamental characteristics separating humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. It was this burdensome humanity that perturbed me as I attempted to write the first ‘Feature’ of the term. I spent a while thinking of what ‘Features’ usually do or are or try to do or be, like the History of Baked Beans in South Carolina or a retrospective of Someone Who Once Did Something Interesting or something. I liked these Features and thought I might be able to do one which was Quite Interesting.

Being given a blank document and the freedom to write about Something Interesting was like walking into a supermarket whilst hungry. Vast quantities of potential provisions lined the shelves, but this wasn’t nerve-wracking and didn’t make me feel anxious because I knew that whatever I chose would at least satisfy my hunger (which may or may not symbolically stand for the desire to have something ‘out there’ of which I was the author) and anyway it didn’t matter if it wasn’t the Best Thing because I was Doing Something at least and that seemed important.

I thought I would find something and write about it Objectively. I thought this was important. I thought this because I had read about a video of what most would consider war crimes being committed by American soldiers in the ‘war on terrorism’, gunning down seemingly harmless Afghan citizens and speaking about the atrocity they were committing like a pair of excited twelve-year-olds, playing Grand Theft Auto for the first time, with their pants around their ankles, masturbating to the sound of the people they Didn’t Understand scurrying in fear and squealing in pain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0). The video was leaked to Wikileaks and was supposed to Change America Forever but Julian Assange and his team gave the video the ‘controversial title’ Collateral Murder upon publication. THE PRESS focused on this ‘controversy’, instead of the killings, and the video didn’t Change America Forever but some people probably wrote a ‘Feature’ on a Person (Assange) Who Had Done Something Quite Interesting instead.

So I thought I would ‘let the facts speak for themselves’. I went on Wikipedia to find out how to do so and it said this: ‘Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities’. I went onto the BBC website to see an example of this in a ‘Feature’ because the Father of Factuality would surely never do something like make judgements about the relative value of human lives at different points in history?

This convinced me that I would have to be careful with my grammar because the facts could sometimes say things I didn’t want them to say if I wasn’t careful with my grammar.

I accordingly started to research some Interesting People and some Interesting Things, but each time I started I felt the future, duty and the past and all those other things which may or may not be of any importance looking over these (imagined as completed) ‘Features’ and rolling their eyes. They were not angry, more disappointed. I realised that facts spoke very quietly if they were left to speak on their own and that they weren’t usually particularly interesting. I thought that the facts were a bit like the sort of books people keep in their lavatories to pass the time whilst they excrete, and that the ‘Feature’ would have to be a story to make it to the bookshelf in the living room, and would probably then have to be a not-objective story to make it to the bedside table.

Hunter S. Thompson said that ‘if you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective’. I thought this was very astute, so I decided not to lie.

Hunter S. Thompson also said that ‘Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon’. I thought this was also astute and so I decided I was wrong about being Objective, and that Assange had just made a bad decision rather than been Wrong, and that I would ‘tell the story’ of the ‘Feature’ itself, as that seemed possibly Quite Interesting and maybe even Of Value. This is what happened to the blank document, and in my imagination the past, duty and the future aren’t shaking their heads anymore. I don’t know how good an imagination I have when it comes to predicting the outcomes of my actions, but at least, I tell myself, I took their opinions into consideration. But at least, I tell myself, I’m not corrupt. But at least, I tell myself, I wasn’t flat-out lying.