Thoughts while waiting for the Warren Jeffs trial to begin in September:
I became a journalist in part because of “The Washington Post” uncovering the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and bringing down the Nixon administration. A few years after Nixon resigned, I watched the movie version of the book, “All the President’s Men,” depicting how Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had investigated the scandal in some of the best work ever done by an American newspaper. I enjoyed the film and over the years saw it numerous times on television. During my fifth or sixth viewing of it, somewhere in the late 1990s, I began to feel a satisfaction that went beyond the fine acting by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and their journalistic triumph in the show. Something more was going on in the movie than I’d first understood: I was watching precisely how, two centuries earlier, our government had been created to act in the face of a serious abuse of power. Everything in the film made sense and had clarity. When the media brought solid information about illicit presidential behavior to Congress, our elected officials and court system responded appropriately to root out the problem. When Nixon knew he was doomed and his Republican colleagues urged him to quit for the good of the country, he took their advice. The four groups involved in this process -- the press, along with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government -- handled the crisis as they were meant to. All those boring civics lessons we’d sat through as children came to life on the screen and what America had been designed to be -- a form of government with checks and balances that worked -- was in fact what it represented in these circumstances. Watching the movie produced a feeling of seeing democracy in action. Put another way, everything surrounding Watergate was real.
The problems we’re facing three decades later go deeper than a runaway war in Iraq, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on that invasion, and a bitterly divided Congress. We’ve lost touch with, or have simply given up the effort to find and confront, our social and political reality. We don’t know the full truth of what happened on September 11, 2001, only that the official story has vast holes in it. We don’t really know why we invaded Iraq, only that the stated mission -- to get rid of Saddam Hussein -- was accomplished more than four years ago but our military presence has lately increased in that country. We don’t know why our voting technology hasn’t worked properly in the last several national elections, only that we can’t seem to fix it or figure out who actually won and who lost. Our Congress is now more interested in one side being right than in investigating any of these issues in depth, while the mainstream media is more concerned with the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the life of Paris Hilton than with any of the above. Excellent journalism is still being done, but it’s happening on the margins of the press, far away from the mainstream and buried under the rubble of round-the-clock news coverage. The mainstream media held cheerleading sessions for us to go to war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and today we have no idea how to conclude or get out either situation. Cause and effect were evident in Watergate, but now they’re lost in the shuffle of constant distraction. Meaning is supposed to be diluted or destroyed. Those in charge of running our country understand this deeply, even if we don’t.
The current assault on America is not simply one of letting the Bush Administration have its way in every important matter, at home and abroad. It’s a conscious effort to keep the system of checks and balances from working -- or letting the system uncover the truth behind any of these huge events. This is not just an attack on the Constitution or our form of government, but on reality itself. The first clue about this came when President Bush, shortly after September 11, told Americans to do their part in the new “War on Terror” by going shopping at the mall. What he was saying to the public was, “You children run along and play. We’re the adults and we’re in charge and we’ll manage all this scary stuff for you. You go have fun.”
After hearing this, every citizen should have been alerted and skeptical, but like children, we went along with parental orders. We chose not to be participants in our democracy but distant spectators, not to seek the reality behind these historical developments, and not to demand answers before we committed our nation to a monumental course of action. The cost of all this is only beginning to sink in. Until you know the truth of any event, it’s difficult to have the right response to it. And assuming you know the truth without investigating can be fatal. Journalism has fallen very far from the height of its claim to importance in the 1970s, and the feeling I have watching the media perform now is exactly opposite of the glow I once experienced viewing “All the President’s Men.” Each of us has the obligation to ask more of the press now and to dig deeper for the truth as individuals. We’re the fifth branch of this social/political process and when the other four stop working, we’re the last best resortforchange.