Richard Reeves’ column in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal reminded me of a truth that makes it terribly difficult to think, almost impossible to commit good journalism.
(His concern was "military disinformatiion." He argued that it can lead to the deaths of soldiers, citing the loss in 1983 of 241 Marines in Lebanon shortly after the Marine Corps Commandment told the Congress they weren’t in any great danger.)
That reminded me of the huge distance between guys who testify on Capitol Hill and guys who carry weapons. Which led me to my concern - the meaning of words.
We say "military" or "judiciary," "church" or "government" or "business." We share the belief that their meaning is clear, concrete, even obvious to all. Yet because humans live in hierarchical institutions, that reality doesn’t exist. It changes depending on whether you live at the top or bottom.
Take the army. Reeves brought me back to 1965 (I think it was), when I spent two weeks filming a TV documentary in Dong Xoai, Vietnam. A handful of US Special Forces, a company of combat engineers and some South Vietnamese Army soldiers waged war there for the "hearts and minds" of the people.
That’s where I learned to appreciate the grunts – brave guys, responsible, innocent. And the Special Forces guys, though they were less innocent. (No doubt, the fact that they were keeping me alive influenced my assessment.)
We had choppered into Dong Xoai from Saigon, where up-and-coming officers conducted daily briefings to mislead the press. If memory serves, the resident press corps called those sessions the "Five o’clock follies." Eventually, the whole nation learned of the big lies perpetrated by the top brass and their civilian superiors in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.
No, generals and Pfcs don’t breathe the same air.
Or consider, in the context of the sexual abuse scandals, the gap between the bishops of the American Catholic Church and the laity. Or the contrasting realities of small businesses, which operate in a competitive environment with the real possibility of failure, and major corporations, which enjoy monopoly or oligarchy, hate competition and use political power to ensure longevity. The family that opens a New Mexican restaurant in the South Valley shares damn little with the CEO of a firm whose stock is listed on the NYSE.
And so on. There is no such concrete reality as "military" or "business." Yet we use these deceptive generalizations every day.
Until we can learn to cut life horizontally, as well as vertically, I just want to keep in mind how words fail to capture reality.