Last night I was reading my son's essay on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. He focused on the book burning, more particularly how book burning helps us forget history and makes it easier to manipulate the populace. I told my son about George Santayana's dictum that those who do not remember history will repeat it. I explained how it is often misinterpreted to mean that we simply repeat the same mistakes over and over again. What Santayana was really trying to say was something much more profound and in our current media/political climate prescient. The discussion made me realize that we are not paying attention to perhaps the most important aspect of the "Gannon Affair", something that goes far beyond hypocrisy, far beyond gotcha journalism, and strikes at the very heart of modern society.
What Santayana was trying to say is that there is a real history, a real past, things that really happened. We should not allow that to get lost in a quagmire of "interpretations." Once we start to believe that history is nothing but interpretation then it becomes meaningless and there is no reason to go back and explore it, to try and determine what really happened. Santayana believed this was dangerous because history, in a sense, was also our future. By understanding what we did and why we did it in the past we set up our guideposts for the future. It is a primary instrument in progress (Santayana was in many ways a progressive - although he was a very complex man) and bettering the human condition. It is our knowledge of the past that helps us pull away the veil on the future. This is the point I believe writers such as Bradbury and Orwell were trying to make, and on a more local level Faulkner and even Fitzgerald. Where there is no past there is no future and all we are left with is a nihilistic present.
What does all this have to do with the "Gannon Affair?" One of the things I have noticed is that many in the media are simply ignoring the past, treating it as if it didn't exist, or allowing it to dissolve in a quagmire of "interpretation." People in the media are saying they do not want to explore the sexual aspect of this story, that it is sleazy, that it is character assassination. I am thinking particularly of the Hotline piece from yesterday (from those who have read it), but this view seems more or less pervasive. And yet, for the most part there is no mention of the history of sex scandal in presidential politics or politics in general. There has been absolutely no mention of Clinton and how he was almost hounded from office as a result of a sex scandal. There is not mention of how Henry Gonzalez's life was destroyed based on a sex scandal. I have no love loss for Dick Morris, but there is no mention of how he was brought down due to a sex scandal. There is not mention of the way reporters pursued hundreds, maybe thousands of sex scandals.
Of course some off the explanation that everything changed on 9/11, but maybe this is the most frightening aspect. Who has license to say that history ended on that day and began again? Are we going to look at 9/11 as year one? Do we not acknowledge the history that has come before? Then where are our guideposts? Where is our ability to pull the veil back from the future? The "Gannon Affair" is a footnote to history. But the ways in which journalists are treating it, as if there is no history, as if there is only a nihilistic present is what is truly frightening. It is what Bradbury and Orwell feared.