Last fall, I wrote a piece for this publication based on my background in the wireless industry, the news of a dust explosion at an iPad factory in China and a one-man show at the Seattle Rep, “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” by Mike Daisey.
This January, KUOW aired Daisey’s story on Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” hosted by Ira Glass and produced by veteran journalists with long chops at National Public Radio. Daisey’s performance has been popularly controversial. Glass didn’t bring Daisey onto a national scene by himself; reviewers did, even a community journalist like me.
On March 17, “This American Life” aired a retraction. So, I learned the facts. That’s why I write now. It’s the first and only retraction I’ve made.
Daisey lied — to Seattle, to you, to me, to audiences near and far.
Public radio, major dailies and this newspaper — because of me — carried that lie. I mistook a tale for truth and repeated it.
It’s not just that Daisey played on a love of technical wizardry: He played on the American collective fear of China. He leveraged political myth — the stuff of Rush Limbaugh and Ralph Nader.
A trail of untruths
What exactly did Mike Daisey lie about?
He claimed to pose as a businessman at 10 Chinese factories; he actually went to three. He claimed to meet underage workers; he met none.
Daisey told a story of a man so crippled by repetitive motion on an iPad line that his hand was stuck like a crab claw; Daisey never met that man.
He described how he was mobbed by Chinese workers who wanted to speak English with him, only there was no mob; no worker he met spoke English. There were illegal union members he never met.
He said Chinese workers met at Starbucks, but Starbucks is more expensive in China than in the United States. Someone who makes U.S. $20 a day wouldn’t order a split-shot, skinny mocha.
He said security guards armed with guns patrolled the perimeters of factories, but in China, only the police and military have guns, not the security guards.
He lied about his translator. Public Radio found Cathy Lee and got the truth.
I should have known better from the beginning of the monologue at Seattle Rep. He described going underground in Hong Kong to find an Asian guru to unlock his iPhone, a scene straight out of the movie “Blade Runner.” Unlocked mobile devices are good for testing software, and they can access different networks if you have SIM cards for the carriers — I know this from 15 years in wireless. Because not all carriers support them, there’s no reason you would want to unlock an iPhone.
I was gullible when I heard him say on stage his story was true. It wasn’t true. Why did Mike Daisey lie?
Making enemies
His explanation over the airwaves is, his piece isn’t journalism; it’s theater, so it should not be mistaken for truth.
I’ve written for the stage, produced scripts and directed actors. If you’ve acted, directed or produced, you know the power of performance, too. If you’ve stood at an open mic, read or recited poems or stories, you know how it feels to have an audience wait on your every word. It’s a special power, and power is addictive. Once in your blood, it’s difficult to let go.
It’s one thing to offer perspective, but it’s another to lie through your teeth for the sake of your ego.
Daisey did that in the worst way. It wasn’t that he just told an appealing yarn — Mark Twain did so on stage, and then there’s Oscar Wilde, Garrison Keillor —but Daisey paraded falsehood as fact to appeal to prejudice.
He made China the enemy.
To understand today’s China, consider a vast nation has advanced economically in the last 40 years what took Western civilization almost 200. The United States went through three industrial revolutions: machines and their factories, workers and their rights, now the bits and bytes of a modern era.
China’s rapid industrialization has significant social issues, just as American society did as we experienced industrialization. Still, as China has advanced so far so fast, so have the lives and hope of its modern, ancient civilization.
The more you look at China, the more China looks American.
So, a modest proposal: Let’s examine easy conclusions we might weigh from what we hear now and then.
The stage door closes. Where now, Mike Daisey?
As a playwright, producer, director, storyteller, poet and journalist — as a writer — I awake to a reflection in the mirror I’ve met each day, since long before I would be who I am. There’s nothing like an honest look in the eye.
CRAIG THOMPSON is a longtime community activist.
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