Sean Penn invented a word last night on “60 Minutes.”
He called himself an “experiental” journalist.
I’ve been working with words for, oh, damn near 40 years. I consider myself a journalist. I worked at four newspapers in two states. I enjoyed some modest success during my career.
“Experiental”? What the . . . ?
Penn is a movie actor of some renown. He recently ventured to Mexico, where he shook hands with Joaquin Guzman, aka El Chapo, the then-fugitive drug lord; he had escaped in early 2015 from a maximum security prison in Mexico. Penn interviewed this supremely evil individual for a 10,000-word article he wrote for Rolling Stone.
I watched with considerable pain in my gut as Penn sought to explain to CBS News correspondent Charlie Rose what he hoped to accomplish by writing a story about El Chapo, who was recaptured by Mexican authorities the day after the magazine article hit the streets.
I think I heard a tinge of sympathy in this guy’s voice as he tried to relay Guzman’s reasons for peddling drugs, for delivering so much misery to so many millions of people, for being responsible for the deaths of thousands of individuals with whom he has come in contact.
I also believe I detected a look of incredulity in Rose’s face as Penn offered his explanations.
And then Penn would drop that hideous, made-up adjective that he put in front of the word “journalist.”
This thought doesn’t come from me, but I’ll pass on what a friend of mine said this morning on social media.
My friend, too, is a trained journalist. He wants to know if he can now seek to become an “experiental movie actor.”
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This just in: I’m advised that “experiental” is a real word. I stand corrected on that particular point.
