Reflections  

Don't blame the victim — Benton Harbor, Michigan, erupts into violence, and leftists across America start making excuses for the disorderly behavior: poverty, no jobs, substandard housing, lack of health insurance. . . . Perhaps they should think about Bush's invasion of Iraq the same way: yes, we were out of line invading Iraq, but we were just acting out because we were still angry about 9/11. After years of institutionalized terror, and disillusionment with peace processes, we just lashed out at the terrorist system that sought to subjugate us. — Tim Slagle

White lies — My first thought upon hearing of the rioting in Benton Harbor, Mich., on the nights of June 16 and 17, was that the rioters were African Americans. Probably that was because there are problems between blacks and the police where I live, and if any riot were touched off in my city by a high-speed chase, it would be a riot by black people.

I read the story on CNN.com. There was no reference to race. None at all. This was a full-length news story, written as if it had occurred in Iceland.

The next day I read an Associated Press story. It did mention race — in the 18th paragraph. The story didn't say anything about the race of the rioters, but it did say the town was overwhelmingly black. You could guess the rest.

I found another story. There it was, where it belonged, in the lead paragraph: black population, white cops.

Why was this fact left out of the first story I read, and only hinted at in the second? Because news organizations are self-censoring.

Is this something demanded by the people in Benton Harbor, Mich.? No. I expect the people throwing rocks and bottles would like it to be known that they are African Americans. Is it demanded by black racial organizations? Maybe, but I don't think so. I think it's a function mainly of the internal workings of white reporters and editors. They are uncomfortable with the whole issue of race. They are not able to talk about it freely, so they just leave it out. — Bruce Ramsey

The Jessica Lynch story — Jessica Lynch was not your typical soldier. She was a waif-like 20-year-old blonde from a small town in West Virginia. She was sent to Iraq, and her unit was ambushed by Iraqi forces. They shot and stabbed her, but she emptied her machine gun into them. After she ran out of ammo, she was captured and taken to an Iraqi hospital, where she was abused by her captors — until she was rescued by daring American soldiers.

Coming at a time when the invasion seemed to be bogging down, this was the first piece of upbeat news from Gulf War II. The heroic actions of Jessica and her rescuers inspired Americans, at the same time illustrating the perfidy of our opponents.

There was one problem with the story. Virtually every detail in it was false.

Lynch was injured, all right, but not by enemy fire. Her extensive injuries resulted from her vehicle's collision with another U.S. Army vehicle. She had not shot a single enemy soldier, or even fired her gun at one. Nor did the Iraqis abuse her; in fact, they saved her life, giving her better medical care than they gave to their own people. And while her rescue did involve Americans bursting into the hospital and firing their weapons, the Iraqis offered no resistance — they welcomed the American soldiers and were anxious to turn Lynch over to them.

That truth is the first casualty of war is by now a cliché. But this episode illustrates something far more important than the propensity of politicians and military bureaucrats to lie.

Nobody ever said it was easy being a journalist. Consider the dilemma faced by Washington Post reporters Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb, who broke the story of Lynch's capture and rescue, and are now taking an awful lot of heat for it.

Neither Schmidt nor Loeb was present at Lynch's capture and rescue. They had to rely entirely on "sources," i.e., on public relations men for the military.

The lies in the story were invented not by the reporters, but by the unnamed PR men. It was a dramatic story, and obviously an important one. They had no means of verifying its accuracy, but it came from a source that they believed reliable.

But they had forgotten that bureaucrats have powerful incentives to lie and very few incentives to tell the truth. They are liars in the classic sense: they say what is convenient, what will help their careers, what will advance their agenda. Consequently, every word that comes from their mouths requires independent verification.

What should Schmidt and Loeb have reported? Only what they knew: that they had been told the story of Lynch's heroic capture and rescue by a military spokesperson who refused to be identified, and who might or might not be telling the truth. That's not such a dramatic a story. But it was true, and a reporter's job is to tell the truth. Schmidt and Loeb forgot this, or had never learned it.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing about the episode. But it seems pretty clear that the story has a happy ending for the military and the Bush administration. The false story concocted by army PR people got tremendous play, raised morale and helped build support for the invasion. In a world where a quarter of Americans believe that Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Americans, where a third believe the U.S. forces found WMD in Iraq, and where more than a fifth of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein is head of al Qaeda, how many Americans noticed the follow-up story of the military's deliberate lying to them? And, in the atmosphere of feel-good celebration of the easy victory, how many really care?

Can anyone believe that the professional liars who concocted the story have been punished for lying? It is far more likely that they have been rewarded, for the same reason that the military and administration did nothing to dispel the false information until their hands were forced weeks later. — R.W. Bradford

The tyranny of law — People who regard the current administration as a danger to liberty should reflect on the Democratic candidates for president. It's a caution to think that Richard Gephardt stands on their extreme right. And this is what Gephardt said on June 23 about the Supreme Court decision in the Michigan affirmative action cases: "When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day." He was speaking at a forum sponsored by Jesse Jackson, and he spoke with the patented indignation of Jackson himself, or perhaps of Joe McCarthy. — Stephen Cox

Panhandlers, cell phones, and restaurant autism — There are certain things I think I've figured out, though they remain obscure to other people.

Some people wonder, for example, why there are practically no left-wing talkshow hosts, and none successful on the national level, except Alan Colmes, who does all he can to make friends with right-wingers. The explanation is twofold. To be successful on the grand scale, you have to express the sentiments of the majority of likely listeners, which in this country means that you have to be on the right. To be fresh and interesting, however, you have to provide something different from the sentiments purveyed by the official media. Since those are left-wing sentiments, the moral is the same: you must position yourself on the right. Very simple: I solved the problem.

If you needed any further proof of my intelligence, I'd let you in on my solution to the free-will problem, the riddle of French political conduct, and the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

But I have to confess that there are some problems I cannot solve. I can't come anywhere near solving them. I'll give you three examples:

1) The Passion for Panhandlers. About 20 years ago, somebody stumbled on a mysterious truth: if you station bums at busy intersections with signs saying "Hungry: Will Work for Food," motorists will give the bums cash. They will take some trouble to do so, and they will do it without making any demand or embarrassing suggestion that any work be performed in exchange. By now, everyone knows that "work-for-food" is just another means of begging, and that the beggars are by no means trying to rehabilitate themselves by finding legitimate work. Anyway, what prospective employee would expect anyone to run out on the median strip during the evening rush hour and offer him a job? The whole thing is patently ridiculous. Yet people still roll down their windows, stick out their hands, and give the bums money. Why?

Please don't provide any generic rationales. I don't want to hear about "2,000 years of indoctrination in the [alleged] Christian ideal of selflessness." I don't want to hear about "the ethical corruptions of the modern liberal culture." I want to know what these strange people think they're doing at the moment when they hit that power-window button and stick those bills into those grimy hands. What could it possibly be?

2) The Overspeakers; Or, Those Who Talk Over Their Hosts. Instead of passing out money to bums on my way home, I usually listen to Los Angeles' favorite drive-time talkboys, John and Ken. Almost every day, John and Ken interview some guest who has a political point to make, and almost every day they ask the guest a question that anyone could answer with a yes or no, only to find that the guest regards the query as an invitation to repeat, over and over again, the inane talking points with which he or she began. Worse: when J and K try to interrupt and restate their question, in the faint hope of bringing the conversation to some higher intellectual level, the guest simply continues to talk. Talk, blab, blat, bleat, emit continuous syllables — the noise goes on with no pause at all. Additional attempts at intervention produce precisely the same effect. The guest just continues yapping, in the same tone and cadence, even after John turns to Ken and says, "It's happening again! Hello! Hello out there! I don't understand it — he just keeps talking! They all do this. Hello! Hello! STOP! He's paying no attention. For God's sake, STOP! He won't stop. They're all like this. Why is this happening?"

Why indeed? And it doesn't happen only on the John and Ken Show. It happens 50 percent of the time when anyone who's being interviewed about anything even remotely resembling an ideological topic is asked a genuine question. The guest talks right over it. Why?

Now, suppose you had some controversial point to make. You were invited to make it (for free!) before a huge audience of your fellow citizens. You would have to know that somebody might possibly, conceivably ask you a question that really meant something. You would have to know that an acceptable answer would have to consist of something more than a dogged reassertion of what you've already said. And you would have to know that American audiences value, indeed vastly over-value, courteous and calm responses. You have this knowledge. But what do you do? You decide to do the most obnoxious, annoying, counter-productive thing possible. Again, what are these strange people thinking?

3) The Spatially Challenged. You're walking down the street and suddenly the man coming toward you looks you in the face and screams, "The hell I will! What do you take me for, an idiot?" Of course you do, but that's only a minor part of your reaction. Your body immediately prepares for fight or flight. Then you realize what's happening: he's just screaming into his cell phone.

Or how about this: you're sitting in a restaurant, talking in low but distinguishable tones with the friends at your table, but your words are drowned out by a booming voice that's reciting every detail of some stranger's sex life. You look around angrily, trying to discover where they put the loudspeaker. But no — what you're hearing is that gentleman over by the window, 50 feet away, who is making sure that every person in the place is privy to things you wouldn't see on an X-rated website. Now, why would any human creature want to talk like that?

I've thought of several reasons, none of them at all sufficient. One that I tried was our era's famous "breakdown in civility," but that explanation had a number of fatal defects. First, it's sheer determinism: nobody has to be uncivil. Second, it's only a negative explanation: civility may be absent, but that doesn't explain where civility went. And third, it's the kind of explanation you'd see in The New York Times.Another possibility, I thought, was: "They don't really know how loudly they're talking." Well, maybe; but if they can't tell what their volume is, why aren't they talking ultrasoftly, at least half the time? Then I thought about the explanatory capabilities of arrogance, aggression, the lust for self-advertisement, and all the other psychic impulses that make people want to get in other people's faces. But this turned out to be the worst explanation of all, because, as I found, it was directly contradicted by experimental evidence.

Have you ever stared directly and menacingly at one of these space invaders, with the obvious implication that if he doesn't lower his voice, you're gonna come after him with a chocolate cream pie? Have you ever raised your own voice in an obvious attempt to shout over him? Have you ever inclined your ear unto him and, with studied facial gestures, demonstrated that you were following with fascination every degrading episode of his last divorce? I've tried all three of these experiments, many times, and never once have I seen the faintest sign of the subject's responsiveness to his audience. I have sat in public places where all conversation ceased, all heads turned, and all eyes focused on the Mussolini-like orator — and the glazed look never left his face. (Or, to be fair, her face; it happens just as frequently with her.) He wasn't trying to ingratiate, impress, intimidate, or insult. He really didn't care who looked at him, or what those people might be thinking. He wasn't trying to get into anybody's face; he was just . . . what? What (yet again) was he thinking?

Explain that to me, you psychologists, sociologists, demonologists, and psychoepistemologists! And when you offer your explanation, I hope it's accompanied with a cure. — Stephen Cox

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.