By Jason Schwalm
In his novel “The Things They Carried,” Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien says about storytelling, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. – All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth.”
O’Brien’s novels make broad, compelling assertions about the shifting nature of events and the unreliability of the narrator. Meanwhile, the public still searches endlessly for authenticity. Faithfully flocking to films that are “inspired by a true story,” we then recite these cinema-histories as fact.
If O’Brien is right, if every story is only another warped manifestation of an earlier telling, then how do we read the news? Why do we even try? His insights are troubling because the free press, designed to provide independent oversight of everyone from your government to your neighbor, is fundamentally a mechanism for storytelling, one that operates at a troubling degree of removal from the event itself.
A car wreck occurs. A reporter interviews three different witnesses, diligently compiling their stories, which are occasionally divergent and even contradictory, into notes. From these notes, an account of the wreck is formed, and then articulated in 300 words on the sixth page of the Metro section. One of the witnesses reads the story later and thinks, “That is not what I saw at all.”
These stories become even more convoluted when the story is about storytelling, about what someone supposedly said or didn’t say, and to whom. We read that various members of President Bush’s administration have been under investigation for events surrounding the exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Lewis “Scooter” Libby recently resigned as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney after he was indicted for perjury and other crimes stemming from his testimony about these events.
In the end, these are war stories, about alleged weapons stockpiles and our cause for attack. Whether they are true or untrue, the average citizen will probably never know. Sen. Harry Reid believes that these events demonstrate “how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq,” but he wasn’t present, either, when the situation was quietly unfolding.
In all likelihood we will never get the whole story, only some garbled recounting courtesy of protracted investigations and tedious press conferences. However, we will find someone – a governmental official, a talk-show host, or a newspaper columnist – to believe. We will take their word as gospel, and quietly shove all disputing evidence and accounts into the background. We will do so with such commitment that, some time from now, we will have forgotten that these conflicting versions even existed.
Did members of the Bush administration expose a CIA operative in order to discredit her husband, and then lie about these actions under oath? If they did, it is only another sad chapter in the recent history of the executive branch of our government. But given the endless cover-ups and equivocations from both political parties, how could we know for sure?
“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you,” says O’Brien. If that is correct, then I believe what I hear.
