Faithful reader Bill pointed out that in last week’s column I erroneously said that in Douglas Adams’ books, “the ultimate answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything was 41.” The correct answer, of course, is 42, which should have been glaringly obvious to me since Papa Bush was 41 and Shrubya is 43 with the only reasonable, functioning solution in recent memory sandwiched between the two. I stand corrected.
In the grand scheme of things my faux pas was minor, causing few real problems in life, but still, admission and correction of errors is the right thing to do. You never know what sort of quagmire even minor errors might eventually spawn. Take for instance the latest local brouhaha at the Observer.
Last week they published a front page picture of Iraqis cheering the hanging from a bridge of the burned and mutilated bodies of ambushed American contractors in Fallujah. Gruesome stuff, true, but it was reporting the reality of war. Still, many (though not I) considered it an error to run the picture.
There was a maelstrom of reader response braying that the horrific picture was simultaneously evidence of the paper’s pro-Bush bias, anti-Bush bias, and anti-animal bias (since it would cause irreparable mental anguish to paper-training puppies). The picture did accomplish what thousands of partisan words had failed to do: it reshaped the Iraqi Brave New War from an idealized Rambo movie into the bloody reality of nation-building by hostile proxy. No error in that.
It could be said that the pictured Fallujah horror was the eventual result of a chain of honest errors in intelligence. America has a long tradition of not being afraid to fight and die for what is right — but the assumption by Americans has always been that its leaders would carefully choose the fights they involved us in. Americans will tolerate an honest error made in the name of truth, justice and the American way, but how about lies covering lies covering nefarious ends? It’s hard to imagine that a simple “Oops, my bad” is going to allay that.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2004.
