This Worldwide Life

According to my Facebook feed, I was promised an early edition of This American Life this week.  The content was supposed to be a hot topic.  The broadcast was supposed to be popular and full of angst.  I've been checking my iPhone for THREE DAYS on the cursed This American Life app, for crying out loud, and no episode!  I finally had to manually find it on the Internet.  JEEZ!  WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY IS THIS...?

*****

Yeah, that paragraph above is a lie.  I actually have been checking the app, but I've been dreading listening to this episode.  Dreading it because society needs someone to be the center of a witch-hunt.  Dreading it because I agree, but not wholeheartedly.
What was magnificent about this episode of This American Life, once I bit down on my belt and listened to it (correction:  I did not bite down on leather of any kind), was not that another episode had to be retracted.  It's not the lengthy pauses of the liar's answers (burn him!). 
It was Act III.
In Act III of the broadcast, Glass goes out on a limb and trusts a guy who really does claim to be a journalist--not just play one on the stage--and ask him about what actually does happen in China in the manufacturing of some of our most beloved electronics.  In case you don't care to listen, I can summarize:  the situation in Chinese manufacturing is disputed because workers and managers can't agree on whether or not the overtime is wanted or not, the situation of safety in the factories could be safer but isn't because it's not a contract demand, and the situation of labor cost is not the determining factor in keeping manufacturing for items like Apple products in China.
I'll let you absorb that last one for a moment.  Maybe I'll even restate it:  the situation of labor cost is NOT the determining factor in manufacturing Apple products in China.
That wasn't a lie.  Honest.
What IS a determining factor in manufacturing Apple products (and other electronics) in China?  Supply.  Pure and simple.  You can get all of the materials for making Apple products immediately in China.  China is willing and able to provide a faster delivery time than the US, or any other country, for that matter.  It's all a matter of TIME.  We want our toys, we want them now, and Apple will get them the fastest way possible if they make their products in China.
It's not labor costs.
It's because everything must materialize...NOW.

*****

James Frey.  Greg Mortenson.  Mike Daisey.  Let's lynch 'em.
I have to wonder, though, while I go gather rope.  (Hey.  I'm lying.  There is no rope.)  I have to wonder what makes a person do this.  I have to wonder what causes them to resort to fabrication to get in the door.
Maybe...that they aren't getting famous fast enough?  Maybe that they don't know how to do what other, admired, effective, honest activists or memoirists do, but they still get asked by their friends, family: "Hey, how's that fight against substance abuse?"  "Hey, how is that school in the Middle East coming along?"  "Have you managed to change the working conditions in China?"
How you like me now? comes the answer, when the account is on Oprah, when the tea raises millions, when Apple is brought to its embarrassed knees.
Not that all three accounts couldn't have happened honestly.  But honesty requires two things in literature:  effective, well-executed prose, and the time to execute that prose.
A short-cut, in essence, would mean saving time.  A wild account that isn't true could help you, the reader, overlook the prose, or allow you, the writer, to break the rules for prose.  Or break the rules for journalism, memoir.
I'm just thinking, maybe, just maybe, the writer has run out of time, and doesn't know how to make the idea work to sell, and takes a shortcut.
We want spectacular, and we want it instantly.  By God, there it is again.  Like watching a baseball player shoot up 'roids because the fans want more home runs, and they want those runs NOW, THIS SEASON.
Onward, dear reader.  And hurry the hell up.