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Watching the news sometimes reminds me of sitting around the kitchen table. A case in point: The crash of TWA flight 800 on Wednesday evening.
When the news came on, nobody really knew anything beyond the obvious -- takeoff time, route, number of people aboard, reports of a fiery explosion in the sky, search and rescue efforts.
All that was known with reasonable certainty could have been reported in a minute or two. But instead, we got treated to hours of mere theorizing: Could it be terrorists? Perhaps a rogue surface-to-air missile? Something in the cargo hold? A counterfeit part whirring into pieces and hitting a fuel tank? Is airport security adequate?
That's exactly what you'd hear around our kitchen table, and the folks on the newscasts didn't know any more than we did. So why were they on the air at all? Give me some information, or give me a MASH rerun, but please realize that those of us in audienceland are just as capable of speculating from ignorance as anybody on the tube.
At least the crash coverage, such as it was,
overshadowed another development of the day -- the
unmasking of Anonymous,
the author of Primary
Colors.
For some reason, America's high-level journalistic establishment felt determined to identify the real author, who turned out to be Joe Klein, a columnist for Newsweek and commentator for CBS News.
I read and enjoyed the book. It was fun, rollicking,
sometimes bawdy, occasionally serious or provocative -- a
good political novel that in ways reminded me of All the
King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren.
And I didn't care who wrote it. If it's good reading, does the author's identity matter?
The Iliad and the Odyssey have stood the test of time and remain vital works, yet we know next to nothing about Homer, or even if there really was a Homer. Scholars spend decades parsing the Old Testament into J, E, D and P segments, yet millions of people continue to draw solace and inspiration from the Bible.
The authorship of Shakespeare's work has been ascribed to everyone from Christopher Marlowe to Queen Elizabeth I, and yet audiences still enjoy the plays -- no matter who wrote them. Our political and judicial systems often look to the 1787-88 Federalist Papers for illumination of the Founding Fathers' views -- and we still don't know whether Alexander Hamilton, James Madison or John Jay wrote a given installment.
Whether the identity of the author is relevant or not,
this perverse fascination with who's saying this?
rather than what's being said here?
extends into
many areas of modern life.
Consider Mary Lefkowitz, a classics professor at
Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She wrote Not Out of
Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as
History
and demolished many bizarre claims -- i.e.,
that Aristotle cribbed his work from the Library of
Alexandria, even though the city, let alone the library,
was not established until long after his death.
It ignited considerable controversy in some quarters.
But some of the attacks were not on her scholarship, but on
her origins, as from one Tony Martin, a black studies
professor at Wellesley, who called it a Jewish
onslaught
that has draped itself in the swaddling
garments of European civilization and white
supremacy.
And I naively thought that Adolf Hitler's dismissal of
relativity as Jewish science,
and Josef Stalin's
enforcement of wishful Lysenko theories as opposed to
capitalist genetics,
represented a long-discredited
approach.
Perhaps Lefkowitz should have published her book anonymously, so that her critics would have to address her research and her logic, rather than her ancestry.
This bizarre modern preoccupation with genetics extends
even into my own mailbox. Occasionally I receive missives
from an uplifting organization called Rocky Mountain
Media Watch,
which apparently has something against me
because I was born male, rather than female, because
women perceive the world very differently from men
and in the Media Watch view, there aren't enough female
columnists in the Denver papers.
They don't seem to care how I write, or what I write about. I'm not contributing to gender diversity, and that's what they care about.
Another example is the great White House drug probe. Heaven knows, the Republicans could find much to criticize in proposals that emanate from the White House staff. Does it matter what may have been in the bloodstream of the author five years ago? It makes as much sense as denouncing light bulbs and motion pictures because Thomas Edison used cocaine.
Can't we address issues on their merits or lack thereof,
rather than try to discredit something because it comes
from somebody whom we can attack for ancestry, habits,
gender, etc.? Is all public discourse now reduced to
consider the source
?
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