Forget tonight’s “X-Files” blowout, in which all is promised to be revealed.
The truth IS out there, but I found it in the season finale of the whimsical television series, “Ed,” whose recent plots have followed the painful paths of unrequited love.
In the “eureka” episode of last Wednesday, Warren, the show’s teen mensch, realizes he loves a girl just as his best friend realizes he loves her, too. Naturally, the girl is fuzzy for the friend instead of Warren, who dithered too long. This lousy plot twist in his life prompts Warren to blurt to his best friend, “The terrorists win if she ends up with you!” — or something greatly to that effect.
The best friend didn’t know what Warren was talking about, but it made sense to me.
Terrorists have been used to justify everything else for the past eight months — closing off government to the citizens who pay for it; holding an unknown number of unknown people in custody for an unknown amount of time into an unknown future; deep-freezing discourse and dissent in a country founded on both; the press being lapdog instead of watchdog to a rubber-stamping Congress and an unassailable President . . . why not Warren’s bad love life, too?
Huzzahs to the writers of “Ed” for playing this card to its most absurd potential. They recognized a truth — that terrorists and terrorism have been the blandly offered and blindly accepted excuse du jour since Sept. 11.
More kudos for being smart enough to speak it from the mouth of a non-babe on a sweet, Middle America show. Which means they could get away with it unlike, say, Bill Maher, whose “Politically Incorrect” program was cancelled last week by ABC. (Maher, you may recall, was pummeled early on in this siege for making what many considered a tasteless and unpatriotic remark about how our country was conducting the war on terrorism.)
But the first sign of cracks in the cone of silence that has enveloped us since Sept. 11 occurred a short 90 minutes before Warren spoke a deeper truth about what has happened to us since Sept. 11.
Last Wednesday evening, CBS News reported that President Bush had been warned by intelligence agencies last August that Osama bin Laden — or OBL as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to calling the culprit whose capture is either important or not important, depending on which day you ask — was intent on hijacking airplanes.
Big newspapers jumped on the story after the CBS lead, and did their own verifying of information. The Courier-Journal carried a front page story by The New York Times on Thursday morning. The main headline read, “Bush told of bin Laden hijack plot.” The sub-headline right below it read, “Suicide attacks weren’t covered in CIA briefing.”
And I knew my phone would be ringing.
Here’s why: Unlike most other terror-related stories, this one wasn’t stage-managed or choreographed or tightly controlled. It wasn’t photo-opped or staged selectively for a news-starved media, held off and blacked out by an administration who said this was a covert war, which meant it had to be fought covertly.
A lot of people bought that argument, and that’s understandable to a point. Sept. 11 was horrifying. A terrible thing was done to us, and its awful reality made believers out of most everybody.
I have had very, very few contacts with readers who want journalists to dig for more information about the war and its ramifications. Rather, most of those I have heard from caution against digging too much, or being too inquisitive, or sharing too much information.
On Thursday, as expected, I heard from a few people who were upset about the Bush story — especially our headlines on it.
“Misleading,” one said.
Wrong.
The headlines were crisply, clearly and accurately written. They fully reflected the story as reported.
“He’s our President,” another fumed.
Right.
He is our President — the operative word being “our.”
And it’s time for us to reclaim ownership.
So much isn’t yet known about all the breakdowns that might have contributed to the efficiency of the deadly attacks of Sept. 11. But I suspect a lot of it will boil down to a line I’ll appropriate from “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I’m not just talking about the intelligence agencies and President Bush and Congress — although given recent revelations, they almost certainly are pentimento to the awful portrait of Sept. 11.
But we cannot be let off the hook, either.
Not the mainstream media, who for too long seemingly backed off from aggressively reporting the implications of and reasons for Sept. 11 and everything since. Strange, isn’t it, that some people whose careers were made over obsessing about one president’s semen stains have been passive and defensive when it comes to another president’s CIA briefings.
Not American citizens — ditto the obsession/passivity theme — who should be demanding more of their proxies in the media and in government instead of settling for so little.
Last October, when all this was beginning, I talked with Paul McMasters, a First Amendment expert, about what this secret war business might mean to media coverage and speech and, bottom line, our American traditions of discourse and dissent. His comments bear repeating. While acknowledging that not everything can be disclosed, McMasters said:
“It is not unpatriotic to demand answers and to provide the American people with the maximum amount of information. If they (the government) don’t trust us with the information, how can we ask to trust them with our security? . . .
“We who are providing the human capital as well as the financial resources for the conduct of any war deserve to have as much information as possible about policies made, and why. If we’re denied (that information), we are not full partners in this democracy.”
It is easier, in the short run, to let someone else lead in a partnership. That’s especially true in the difficult partnership of democracy. But the truth has a way of not staying put. It almost always cuts in.
The truth IS out there, and it’s tapped us on the shoulder.
