Gossip or bullshit – what’s the difs?

THE impression our Dutch Reformed minister made on young Neelsie's mind with a sermon against gossip was indelible, which sermon later turned out to have been provoked by members of the congregation spreading the news of his relationship with a married sister that led to the end of his own first acquaintance with holy matrimony.

Gossip is not God's way of doing things, he said. Now Kelsey McKinney, in her bestseller You Didn't Hear This From Me, makes the point that gossip is two people talking about someone who is not present. Therefore, she says, prayer is one of the archetypes of gossip.

So far in my life I have failed to have any regard for our pastor's abhorrence of gossip. I wouldn't have gotten anywhere in journalism if I hadn't enjoyed a good skinner story. You hear it, and then you spread it.

McKinney understands the excitement that drives gossip. Like a Mentos that you swallow to let the soda squirt into your stomach. Those magical moments in which you have everyone's attention, in which you let the drama pump and bombard the smaller circle of your listeners' ears with a Truth, a Fact that they Never Knew: Minister Jannewiet, our Afrikaans Guru of What-What Affairs, pressed his wife's hand on their stove's spiral plate until you could smell the flesh!

McKinney of course doesn't know about Minister Jannewiet, it's just I who identify with her insights. Mea culpa. I fully understand Kelsey who as a teenager often went on her knees and asked the Lord to help control her tongue. But, shortly after one turns 20, one gains a new understanding of the eternal struggle that ministers have to discipline the loose tongues in their congregations.

You simply realise that the art of gossip has also had an evolution of its own, and that what you experience and practise as healthy and unhealthy gossip is not at all the sinfulness that Paul had in mind in his second letter to the Corinthians.

McKinney (and I) thoroughly agree with the thinker Louise Collins that gossip is not a hallmark of femininity. But to the extent that it is possibly true that women have a more natural aptitude for the winged revelation of a foul-smelling unverifiability, as bell hooks says in All About Love, it is because gossip allows them to say what they really think.

The misconception exists that you can't gossip about yourself. McKinney has no regard and recounts how she was obsessed with Britney Spears as a teenager, so obsessed that she later travelled to Spears's place to do a story about her. Fortunately, McKinney knows exactly how she, as Kelsey, grasped the bigger truths.

This moment of illumination allows her to write with great understanding about the so-called Gaylors and their manic outing of celebs. It's not about people like Lorde who drags her “secret” lover on stage and seduces him in front of everyone. It's about people like Taylor Swift, who the Gaylors say are lesbians.

In such cases, it is about obsessive behaviour, and one of its characteristics is the creation of gossip stories that are devoid of any truth. If you repeat the story a sufficient number of times, it becomes true.

Detective work, then destruction

Another Big Problem in the gossip sphere is becoming the main character in the eyes of many people – on Facebook, X and myriad of similar underworlds that thrive on American campuses. There is nothing as bloodthirsty as gossipers who detect a loose mouth on social media. First the detective work, then the destruction.

As McKinney admits, she can sniff out virtually all the confidential details of people via social media and the use of diverse platforms. Ever heard of Zillow, do you follow Deuxmoi on Instagram, have you heard of consensual doxxing ? Neither have I, but I'm learning fast.

I googled McKinney. I tried to understand how someone with such keen insight into the media could waste her time creating first and second and third waves of juicy gossip about every episode of The Real Housewives of whatever dump is in the spotlight. Of course, nothing compared to the scamming housewives. They come from a genetic pool for which there is not even a scientific description yet.

You Didn't Hear This From Me truly becomes required reading when McKinney explains how urban legends grow into full-fledged conspiracy theories. She recounts how a story about a physical doppelgänger for Melania Trump began circulating in 2017. Naturally, the Trump administration denied the existence of such a figure. But with a president who has told more than 30 500 demonstrable lies in his first term, no one believed the denial.

Why did the rumour become a conspiracy theory? Because Americans felt it was true, and didn't bother with verification.

And so, in a highly entertaining way, McKinney finally swings to the big question of our time. How does one distinguish between gossip and outright bullshit? Between the two, we know from Trump's first term, lies a corpus of lies. When the lying becomes the facade, and we discover it, you see the calculated, narcissistic lust for power behind it.

Gossipmongers are the cowboys who want to ride the rutting bull of truth for short periods of ecstasy. The megalomaniac is someone who doesn't particularly notice that bull. He eyes all the beasts of the world.

McKinney concludes her book with a quote from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world."

Selah.

You Didn't Hear This From Me by Kelsey McKinney is published by Grand Central Publishing and costs R787 at Amazon SA.

♦ VWB ♦

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