After having read Mike Daisey's March 25th blog post about his Apple monologue disaster,

and after having listened, in its entirety, to the March 19 talk he gave at Georgetown University about the scandal; and having listened, also in their entirety, to the original show he did on This American Life and the later TAL retraction show on which he was doggedly questioned about his looseness with facts, a few things appear clear to me:

1.) Mike Daisey is a mess. I think he'd be more than willing to admit this. In fact he pretty much does admit it, especially in the Georgetown talk and on the TAL retraction show. I think most of us, in his situation, would be a mess. He has been all over the place in his responses to the scandal: he was shell-shocked and in denial in the TAL grilling on the rules governing his art; he was defiant and disingenuous in his March 19 blog post about how it was "art," not lies, that moved his audiences (I have only heard the monologue portion that aired on TAL, but the parts I found most emotionally moving – such as the anecdote about the man with the ruined hand and Daisey's story about his personally having met 12-year-old workers – now appear to have been fabricated or exaggerated); he is earnest, repentantly self-effacing, and politically passionate about the untold stories of Chinese workers in his Georgetown talk; and now, in his March 25 blog post – faced with a quote from one of his past interviews in which Daisey clearly lays out the rules for theatrical truth-telling – he openly admits how he broke them in his Apple monologue and he seems to have let go of the need to artistically defend the license he took. His trajectory seems to be toward acknowledgement of what he did and calling even more insistently for addressing the much greater cause of justice and media attention for Chinese workers. He clearly got in way over his head with TAL, and I'd advise pundits to take care in trashing him. You know what they say about glass houses.

2.) Daisey didn't need to lie or misrepresent his experience in order to succeed with his monologue. That's the awful irony of all this. Between the things he actually experienced on his trip and the known facts about incidents and outrages in Chinese manufacturing for Apple, Daisey could have constructed and performed a monologue that was riveting, devastating, and, as TAL asked of him, bulletproof against the predictable attacks and questions from Apple and corporate media. In his Georgetown talk, Daisey says about his panicked deception of TAL's producers, "I should have been wiser. There must have been a path that would have worked [in being able to air the monologue without misrepresentation]. I don't know what it would have been, though." I could be all wrong, but I have a suggestion: had Daisey been honest with TAL, they might have instead constructed a show about how a gifted writer and actor with a compelling story found himself getting carried away with the telling of the story, and how he finally came clean about this under the pressure of doing a national radio broadcast. And Daisey could have performed a monologue, on TAL, about what he truly saw in China and what he didn't see, and how and why he had gotten carried away in some of his monologue lines, and what is actually documented as happening in Chinese factories, and how as an apolitical privileged American techno-geek he found himself devastated, disoriented, and evangelicized by the raw power of what he witnessed and what he learned from others about where his iPhone comes from. Sure, maybe that idea wouldn't have flown. All I can say is, as a TAL listener I'd certainly tune in to a show like that. But in any case it's water under the bridge. What is clear, and what Daisey clearly knows, is that his monologue doesn't (and won't) need misrepresentations in order to work as theater.

3.) Daisey is a great talker. He is a brilliant talker. He is such a good talker, in fact, that, given the glibly convincing way in which he represented untruths as real events in his monologue, I am not sure I believe much at all of what he now says. I'm not sure I believe his explanations for things he still insists he saw in China that his translator says didn't happen. I am not sure I believe his tortured account of why he did what he did and how he now feels about it. I am not sure, actually, that I believe anything Mike Daisey says. This is a real problem for me; there is much of what he now says that I want to believe. But I'm having a lot of trouble doing so. I don't know what to do with this. But I needed to say it.

4.) When Daisey says that he should not be the big story – that Apple and China should be the big story – he is absolutely right. I do think he understands that his dishonesty in the telling of such a heart-rending, high-stakes human story has become a hugely emotional public event partly because his story itself so deeply rocked our world as spoiled American gizmo-users, and partly because a lot of us, including me, feel an angry sense of his having betrayed and manipulated both us and the issue of workers and Apple. But Daisey is correct when he says it's an atrocity that the news cycle is dominated by his scandal rather than by the human suffering embedded in electronics built for us by people in China who we will never see.

That is why, as Daisey suggests, you need to read the New York Times series on Apple's suppliers, and listen to the NPR story about an explosion at an iPad plant that workers say happened just hours after Apple inspected the plant, and look at the research by NGOs  regarding cruel working conditions and worker suicides at Apple supplier plants in China.

And that is why, unless there is something of huge public importance related to him in the future, I will not blog about Mike Daisey again.