BRIAN WILLIAMS:  THE LYNCH MOB GATHERS

Jerry Harkins

“Crucify him! Crucify him!”

                                                                        —Luke 23:21

Many years ago, the University of Kansas required new graduate students in the sciences to take a course introducing them to the research process.  One of the professors had a demonstration he conducted early every semester.  One member of the class (a fellow named Roy the year I took the course) burst in late, ranting, raving and acting in a threatening manner as though he had suddenly gone berserk.  After a minute or two, he left still screaming.  The professor, obviously shaken, told the members of the class to write a description of what had happened because the event was certain to have repercussions.  It may not surprise you to learn that the accounts varied widely.  Some thought Roy had waved a gun.  One said he threatened the professor with a knife.  Some recognized Roy as a fellow student; others did not.  And so forth.  It had all, of course, been staged to make what now seems an obvious point.  Eye witness testimony is unreliable and the more involved the witness is the less reliable the testimony.  Even highly intelligent graduate students cannot be counted on just minutes after being eye witnesses to an event.

It is, as I say, obvious.  So if I told you my story about the night a mugger tried to rob me, you would do well to assume that something like that happened but you wouldn’t want to hang for the details.  If you heard the story again five years later, you wouldn’t be surprised if some of the details had changed.  Memory is capricious.  My mother had a remarkable memory for poetry.  She could recite Longfellow’s 1,399-line poem “Evangeline” in its entirety.  But she always made tiny mistakes.  In her memory, the first line was, “This is the forest primeval.  These are the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.”  There is no “These are” in Longfellow’s version.  The murmuring pines and hemlocks are the subject of the second sentence which is 38 words long.  They are eleven words removed from their verb.  Her memory was distorted and she essentially re-punctuated a run-on sentence.

I was in kindergarten when the Allies landed at Normandy.  All I remember of the war are the air raid sirens, the rationing and the collecting of old newspapers and aluminum foil.  But I also remember emotions:  the fear during air raid sirens and blackouts, the sadness of watching veterans trying out their new wooden legs on Fourth Avenue, the anxiety when my father was drafted and the joy when he returned home the same day because of a new and more optimistic rule about age and the number of children.  I think I remember being sent once in a while to the corner drugstore to buy two cigarettes for him.   I think I remember encountering women crying in the street.  But, always, the line between fact and fiction is indistinct and I know that my stories get better and more entertaining as I repeat them.  Often I don’t know whether a memory is true or false.

It all seems so obvious but it is something that has never occurred to the editors, pundits and reporters of The New York Times.  I have written elsewhere about their obsession with plagiarism and their addiction to what they are convinced is the moral high ground.  The most recent example of the latter is the vast amount of time and energy they are devoting to destroying the reputation and career of Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor (and, not incidentally, one of their principal competitors).  Mr. Sulzberger and his minions will not rest easily until Williams is branded with a scarlet L on his forehead, L as in liar.

Now given that smart people often do stupid things, I suppose it is possible that Mr. Williams inflated his involvement in a military incident that happened a dozen or so years ago.  But in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is obviously more logical to conclude that the inaccuracies, first reported by Williams himself, were nothing more than quirks of memory, or what The Times’ health writer, Tara Parker-Pope, called the “fallibility and malleability of human memory.”  She wrote, “Mr. Williams has been branded a liar for embellishing his role in the event, with critics saying that as a newscaster he should be held to a higher standard…But memory experts see the issue differently, noting that the well-documented story, told differently many times by Mr. Williams, actually offers a compelling case study in how memories can change and shift dramatically over time.”

Sadly, hers is the only Timesean voice to take account of the obvious, never mind the views of memory experts.  Otherwise the newspaper of record attacked with front page stories and punditry for more than a week.  Maureen Dowd, usually the resident pit bull, was slightly less agitated than is her wont and David Brooks came out for “rigorous forgiving” and “tough but healing love” following “extreme self-abasement.”  It all sounded a bit like what Bishop Cauchon felt should be rendered to Joan of Arc.

The substance of the story is not really important.  Mr. Williams did indeed embellish his role but he surely wasn’t blowing his own horn.  He was where he said he was.  There were real bullets being fired in anger.  He said his helicopter got hit but that was the one ahead of his.  He came out of his own story looking frightened and grateful for the protection of others.  It was a filler, a feel-good story about one of the soldiers who had gotten them out of an antsy situation.  But for the Times, it was another chance to drag out the usual anonymous sources to certify that he is an ogre in the newsroom, disliked and distrusted by all his right-thinking colleagues and by the off-camera executives of the news division.  While they were at it, they recycled every accusation anyone ever made about their target du jour.  One expert said Williams may not have seen a dead body floating down Canal Street during Hurricane Katrina.  Of course the expert wasn’t there.  In journalism they call this investigative reporting.  In football, it’s called piling on and it draws a fifteen yard penalty.

At least the Times knows its story is trivial.  It’s only point in telling it to death is that journalists should be held to a higher standard than human beings.  The NBC executives—the suits—on the other hand do not know this.  To them the Williams brouhaha  is a full blown end-of-the-world crisis.  These are folks with a genetic predisposition to screwing things up.  Their number is legion and their stupidities are egregious:  Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, all before nine in the morning.  And so as not to slight the evening, one can think of their brilliant management of the Tonight Show franchise:  Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno.  They apparently got rid of the distinguished physician Nancy Snyderman because she broke a self-imposed quarantine after it became clear she had not been exposed to ebola.  These clowns are allergic to heat but are too young to remember Harry Truman’s advice to get out of the kitchen.  The anonymous sources are probably right.  They probably do dislike their star anchor who gets all the credit for their hard work and is paid more to boot.

The entire Williams affair could be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot except that it is so damned typical of what the world seems to be coming to.  I get angry at the Times for being coarse, self-interested and sanctimonious.  But attack journalism is no worse than the mendacity that characterizes our politics or the power lust of our religious leaders or the greed that virtually defines our business climate.  Our institutions are failing us and this means only one thing:  we are failing ourselves.

A politician—I think it was Mario Cuomo—once said America needs a new constitutional convention but it would be dangerous to call one because the Bill of Rights might very well fail to pass.  I remember joking that only nine of the ten amendments would be in jeopardy but it is no longer a laughing matter.  It is not just that we have become excessively contentious but also that we seem unable to mount a civil or even intelligent debate.  We cannot distinguish between the vital and the pedestrian.  What is at stake is nothing less than the ability of a free people to freely govern themselves.

PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER;  HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN.  THE GUITARIST ON THE OTHER HAND…

Jerry Harkins

            For more years than is sane, I have been trying to learn to play the guitar.  This quest has not been notably successful.  Still, week after week, for many years, my life was pretty much defined by The Lesson.  Tension mounted as the hour approached, released after it was over and then began the cycle all over again.  The lesson itself was almost irrelevant.  Sometimes it was sublime, other times it felt like something that should be banned by the Geneva Convention.  But what really matters is what happened before and after.  Between lessons I always had to choose between the agony of practice and the joy of playing albeit poorly.  When I practiced, I heard every mistake in bold relief.  When I played poorly, I never heard a mistake.  When I practiced, my dominant emotion was boredom.  When I played poorly, it was serenity.  Talk about poor Hobson and his famous choice!  Practice never had a chance.

            The problem is twofold.  On the one hand, I am not a person who is big on mortification of the flesh never mind of the psyche.  I do have a stubborn streak but my life mantra is that of Charlie Brown.  There is no problem so big that I can’t run away from it.  But first it is necessary to tempt fate.  So, like Charlie, every week I returned to the field of battle.  Heisenberg notwithstanding, there was nothing more inevitable in the universe than the absolute certainty that Lucy would snatch the football away at the last moment and I would wind up on my ass.  Once again.  But honor would have been served.  Run, Jerry.  See Jerry run.

            I was the only kid in my class that actually wanted to take piano lessons.  By the time I was knocking on the door of middle age and could afford one, I bought a piano and did, so I thought, reasonably well with it.  But then one day I was playing the Brahms’ Haydn Variations for one piano four hands with my friend Helen, an attorney who had been playing seriously since the age of six.  I suddenly realized that I would never play as well as she and that, if the object was to enjoy myself, I should switch to something easier, like the guitar.  Six strings.  How hard could it be?

            Every musical instrument is a compromise with its own physics.  Six strings plus nineteen frets and, of course, one “open” position which means that each string is capable of sounding twenty notes.  Well, not strings 3 and 4 where the last fret is missing to make room for the sound hole.  So, a total of 118 notes.  But many notes can be played in multiple combinations of string and fret.  You see the problem, don’t you?  The music says F-sharp of which there are seven on the fretboard, two or three in each octave.  Your choice depends on what other notes you’ll be playing at the same time and where your poor fingers are coming from and where they have to go next.  Altogether, the typical guitar can play 33 different notes compared to 88 notes on a piano.

            It’s a bit like Fermat’s Last Theorem which bedeviled mathematicians for 358 years.  There are no whole numbers a, b and c that can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any value of n greater than two.  Similarly, there is no way to arrange ten fingers, six strings and fourteen frets as to be able to play more than a handful of chords in a handful of keys.  Fortunately most contemporary guitarists can actually play only a few chords.  Bob Dylan, for example, knows four, three of them fairly well.  Michael Jackson actually mastered none but it didn’t make any difference because he used his guitar as though it were a drum.  (There is a reason the instrument is known as an “ax” among rockers.)  Unlike guitarists, guitar teachers have six fingers on each hand and thus have no trouble with sounds like the mystic chord invented by Alexander Scriabin.  It consists of C, F#, Bb, E, A and D.  “Its preternatural stillness was a gnostic imitation of a hidden otherness,” said Alex.  Perhaps it makes more sense in Russian.

            It is a little known fact that the great Spanish novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes is an extended metaphor for following the quest of becoming a guitarist.  In fact, in the first draft of the manuscript now in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the title of the book is El loco guitarrista de la Mancha.  It ends with a variation of Charlie Brown’s lament, “To try when your fingers are too stiff to reach the impossible chord.”

            My lessons came to an end when my teacher went off on an impossible quest of her own but she bequeathed to me her precious copy of Méthode complete pour Guitare, Opus 59 by Matteo Carcassi.  As I diligently worked my way through it, I assumed that Matty had had at least two extra fingers, that is fourteen instead of the standard guitar teacher issue of twelve.  But when they exhumed the body prior to his canonization in 2012, they discovered he indeed had only twelve fingers but he also had twelve toes.  God is good to guitar teachers, possibly because they introduce a note of levity into an otherwise somber universe. 

            If it weren’t for the teachers, there would be no guitar player jokes.  As it is, they (I refer to the jokes but it could just as easily mean the teachers) are a dying art as more and more jurisdictions pass laws against hate crimes.  Maybe you remember some of these from a less politically correct time.  What's the difference between a dead skunk and a dead guitar player in the middle of the road?
 There are skid marks in front of the skunk. "Mommy! Mommy! When I grow up I want to be a guitar player!" 
"Now Johnny, you can't do both!" 

            All jokes are rooted in an element of truth.  Any otherwise normal person who imagines eliciting music from six strings and an empty box shaped like a misshapen woman is, at a minimum, slightly eccentric.  There have been some miracle workers who could pull it off but even they spend half their lives tuning the damn thing which sulks when you ask it to stay on pitch.  Still, every year millions of people listen to the likes of Jimmy Hendrix named the world’s greatest guitarist by Rolling Stone magazine.  And they think to themselves, how hard could it be?  Fortunately, there is hope for such fools (and for Jimmy Hendrix).  Like all the hope left in the world, it comes from China via Silicon Valley.  It’s called Guitar Hero and is a digital game with a controller shaped like an electric guitar.  You play it by pushing buttons that light up in a sequence programmed for various heavy metal songs.  If that sounds too difficult, you can always try Air Guitar.