Seven weeks ago Torricelli, who serves on the committee investigating campaign irregularities, gave a tug to the nation’s heartstrings when he advertised his sensitivity about insensitivity toward Asian-Americans. Sensitivity-mongering has special Eclat when coupled with a boast of victimhood, and Torricelli managed this coupling. He remembered how pained he was by unflattering Italian-American stereotypes that he recalls being fostered by Sen. Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings into organized crime. Torricelli’s cri de coeur was a three-hankie performance:
““It is among the first memories I have of government of the United States, and probably the first hearing of the United States Senate I ever witnessed. It was only on a flickering television screen, but I will never forget it, and even if I tried, my family would never allow me.''
““Among’’? ““Probably’’? ““Witnessed’’? He was five days old when Kefauver’s hearings ended in 1951. When a journalist asked Torricelli about his prodigiously early interest in public affairs, Torricelli upbraided the journalist for missing the larger point, about ““insensitivity.''
You might think that, having been caught perpetrating such a whopper, Torricelli would have slunk off to wherever such people slink. Think again. The very traits that cause people to tell such tales make them impervious to embarrassment, so last week Torricelli blew on the cooling embers of the controversy by writing a letter to The Wall Street Journal. In it he continued his lamentation about the sorry state of journalism as evidenced by people writing about something as ““trivial’’ as the question of whether his melodramatic memory was real or fictitious, or whether his emotional trauma occurred when he was five days old or perhaps when he saw ““footage from the hearings as an older child.’’ That last is apparently now his story and he’s sticking to it, for now.
Torricelli could save himself a lot of bother by simply invoking the Reich Rule of Epistemology. It is that any proposition is true–or true enough, or as true as anything gets–if it comports with one’s feelings about, or ““perceptions’’ of, something. Former labor secretary Robert Reich was recently found (by journalist Jonathan Rauch) to have fabricated events recounted in his book ““Locked in the Cabinet,’’ which is loosely–very loosely–called a ““memoir.’’ For example, Reich recounts being bombarded by rude questions hurled at him through dense cigar smoke (““my eyes water. I feel dizzy’’) at an all-male (““There isn’t a lady in the room’’) lunch of the National Association of Manufacturers.
But it was a breakfast; at least a third of those attending were women; NAM rules forbid smoking; the transcript records no questions remotely like those Reich recounts. Asked about this, Reich breezily noted this–what? disclaimer?–in his book: ““I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.''
A few decades ago, the word ““existential’’–a European import as popular as the Volkswagen beetle–was an all- purpose license to assert almost anything. Any proposition, however much at variance with boring evidence, could be said to express the ““existential reality’’ of the speaker’s experience. Today there is another equal-opportunity epistemology: anyone has a right to postmodernism’s protection against standards of accuracy.
Postmodernism is the degenerate egalitarianism of the intelligentsia. It launches a non sequitur from a truism. The truism is that because our knowledge of facts is conditioned in complex ways by the contexts in which facts are encountered, the acquisition of knowledge is not simple, immediate and infallible. The non sequitur: therefore all assertions are equally indeterminate–and equally respectable. All ascriptions of truth are arbitrary, so there are no standards of intellectual conscientiousness. So whoever has power shall decree the truth.
In a ceremony in Boston last Saturday, on the 70th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Mayor Thomas Menino accepted a design for a memorial to the two men who were convicted of murder in what was called ““an American Dreyfus case,’’ one tinged with passions aroused by the men’s anarchist politics and immigrant backgrounds. Menino says, ““Our acceptance of this work of art is a statement by the city that these men did not receive a fair trial.’’ Actually, it is a statement that they were innocent.
It is arguable that both were. And it is arguable that both were guilty. Or that one was innocent, the other not. Certainty about this case, always elusive, is by now probably unattainable. So political pressures prevail. And given the watery postmodernism of the age, why not? After all, there are no reliable facts, only ““perceptions.''
A California community college has scheduled a three-day September seminar to teach that the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy. One scheduled speaker thinks the conspiracy was organized by Israel. Another speaker, the elected head of the board of trustees of the community college district, reportedly has said, and subsequently has denied saying, that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the Anti-Defamation League. Such theories are not markedly more vicious and imbecilic than those of the movie ““JFK’’ that was perpetrated by the intellectual sociopath Oliver Stone. Such people can justify any intellectual licentiousness by claiming no higher truth than their perceptions.
Torricelli says people who dwell on his ““trivial’’ fabrication are neglecting the momentous story of ““the deterioration of the political process.’’ Actually, his notion of what is trivial is part of that story.
