By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 12, 2015
We live in a weary age of fable.
The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled Truth. But the film is actually a
fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his 60
Minutes producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing
interests into resigning.
In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that
Rather and his 60 Minutes team — just
weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of
dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty
as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.
The fabulist movie comes on the heels of the Benghazi
investigations. An e-mail introduced last month at a House Benghazi committee
hearing indicated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — just hours
after the attacks on the consulate that left four Americans dead — knew almost
immediately that an “al Qaeda-like group” had carried out the killings.
Clinton informed everyone from her own daughter to the
Egyptian prime minister that the killings were the work of hard-core
terrorists. Yet officially, she knowingly peddled the falsehood that a video
maker had caused spontaneous demonstrations that went bad.
Apparently, the truth about Benghazi clashed with the
2012 Barack Obama re-election narrative about the routing of al-Qaeda. For
days, Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the president himself likewise
sold the fantasy of video-driven killings.
The Black Lives Matter movement grew out of the fatal
shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. The
protestors’ signature slogan, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” evolved from the belief
that Brown raised his hands after Wilson had fired the first shot and told the
officer, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting” in the seconds before his death.
Yet the Justice Department exonerated Wilson, concluding
that Brown was shot after struggling with, and then charging toward, Wilson. Brown,
who had allegedly stolen cigars from a liquor store shortly before his
encounter with Wilson, neither put up his hands to surrender nor was shot in
the back while fleeing, according to the Justice Department report.
Utter disregard for old-fashioned truth is now deeply
embedded in contemporary America, largely because it advances a particular
agenda. It reminds of an earlier age of politically correct fable, when
evidence in the Alger Hiss case and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case got in
the way of ideologically useful mythologies.
In another example of fantasy reinvented as reality, a
Texas teen, Ahmed Mohamed, brought a strange contraption with dangling wires to
class. He was promptly detained, understandably so in a touchy post-9/11
climate.
Ahmed claimed that he was a young inventor and was just
showing off his creation. He became a cause célèbre — an iconic victim of
Texas-style anti-Islamic bigotry. President Obama invited him to the White
House. Silicon Valley’s zillionaire techies pronounced him a budding genius.
But the bothersome truth again was not so glorious. A
number of experts have shown how Ahmed had simply taken out the insides of an
old Radio Shack digital clock, put it in a different case with some wires
hanging out, and passed it off as some sort of new electronic timepiece.
No matter. The myth of supposed religious and racial
bigotry thwarting a young, modern-day Alexander Graham Bell proved more
powerful than the banal trick of repackaging a cheap clock.
Subsequent fact-finding does not seem to dispel these
untruths. Instead, what could or should have happened must have happened, given
that the noble ends of social justice are thought to justify the means deemed
necessary to achieve them.
The 60 Minutes
memos about Bush’s Air National Guard service were never authenticated.
Everyone now rejects the myth that the Benghazi attack was a result of a video.
Investigators proved that Michael Brown was not executed by Officer Wilson.
Ahmed was neither a young prodigy nor a victim of bias.
But the legends are created and persist because they
further progressive agendas — and the thousands of prestigious and lucrative
careers invested in them.
“Noble lies” alter our very language through made-up
words and euphemisms. In our world of fable, there can be no such people as
“illegal aliens” who broke federal laws by entering the United States.
“Workplace violence” is how the Obama administration described the Fort Hood
shootings, rather than calling it terrorism. American servicemen who shoot and
die in Iraq are not supposed to be called “combat soldiers.”
The enlightened ends of seeking racial and religious
tolerance, equality of opportunity, and political accountability are never
advanced by the illiberal means of lying. What makes this 2016 election so
unpredictable are fed-up voters — in other words, Americans who finally are
becoming tired of being lied to.
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