Political Urban Myths: Rumors That Won’t Die

Perhaps the strangest part of the Whitewater scandal to date is the firestorm of rumor it produced about the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. The stories about Foster--tales of con spiracy, sexual assignations and murder--began simmering right after he died last summer. Fueled by government secrecy, they came to a boil this spring in flaming tabloid headlines and still hang over the whole Whitewater affair, giving it an acrid, sinister smell.

But the rush of Foster stories was no anomaly. Apocryphal information plays an increasing role in common discourse, whether in local news or high politics.

For example, newspapers and magazines have always run human-interest stories illustrating the quirky variety and universal truths of daily life. Nowadays, though, this feature is more likely to be called, as it is in Washington’s City Paper, “News of the Weird.” Here we learn that a 35-year-old Colorado man was beaten up in a barroom fight, came home, blew his nose and had his eyeball fall out. (Doctors repaired the damage.)

It may be some consolation to know this growing love affair with the weird has seized the British, too. There, the journal Fortean Times gathers stories like that of the Southampton police who found a severed ear and refrigerated it; but when the ear’s owner finally called to inquire, he was told the ear had already “gone off.” “It was next to an egg roll that had gone off as well,” said a police spokesman, “so there was nothing we could do.”

But America has the lead. In fact, Fortean Times is named after an American--Charles Forte, who, at the turn of the century, railed against the straitjacket that scientific rationalism imposed on human thought. Forte may have been the first to speculate that those mysterious lights in the sky were alien spacecraft.

In recent years, Forte has gained adherents by the carload. In fact, there is a comic book, “Urban Legends,” that tells three dozen currently circulating myths in gruesome graphics. The best known of these modern tales are here: How people brought little alligators home from Florida as souvenirs, then flushed them down the toilet. So now there are alligators in the sewers, and you’d better be careful when you go to the bathroom. Or how the lady with the beehive hairdo, which she kept hair-spraying and never washed, turned out to have a colony of black widow spiders eating away at her brain.

For even many sophisticated folks, who think they believe in science and in rational explanations, have now developed a dark, baroque, Fortean view of American politics and public life.

Maybe the change started with John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which caused the public to believe that the democratically expressed will of the people could be overmastered by sinister plotting done in secret. In the years since, public opinion about the assassination has increasingly been ruled by conspiracy theories of the most convoluted, Florentine sort.

Then followed Vietnam, the anti-war movement, Watergate and the coming of a more elaborate ethics system to define, uncover and punish public corruption. People began to see much more than before about officials’ venality and sneakiness. In the private sector, white-collar prosecutions became more numerous; U.S. corporations were increasingly paraded before the country as conspiring enemies of the public interest.

The media started to give more attention to the private lives of public people, and news consumers learned about previously unsuspected strangeness among the famous. The press also increased coverage of bizarre events in the society at large: Never, before today, could much of the country have an up-close, day-in-day-out look at a spectacle like the Menendez trial.

It is impossible to say for sure whether there is more corrupt, bizarre, inexplicable, non-rational behavior in this country than in olden days, and just as impossible to know with certainty whether such behavior plays a larger-than-ever role in guiding the country’s destiny. There is no doubt, though, that we are aware of more such behavior than we used to be. We do not merely suspect but actually know that politicians are capable of distasteful sexual habits. We know details about the predations of Jeffrey L. Dahmer.

This increased visibility and disclosure have trained citizens and opinion makers to think even a seemingly loony story just might be true--and that anyone who pooh-poohs it may end up looking the fool. At the same time, the publicity has discouraged trust in official channels of communication. Rumor is the alternative.

Finally, the new communications have simply put people in touch with one another in an increasingly immediate way. For example, stock markets, in America as elsewhere, have always been rife with rumor, since their denizens make a living from knowing pieces of news just a few seconds before the other guy. But now these people are hooked up by phone and computer to the entire known universe. It is no surprise that a rumor or joke can begin in the fertile, cheerfully demented mind of some bond trader and spread nationwide in 24 hours.

Rumors are fun. They are almost invariably more exciting than the stuff that makes up daily reality. Yet they are moving closer to the center of not only our casual interest but our public life--and this is a warning. It means that people are not just skeptical about what government tells them but unbelieving. It means we think of our world as one where violence and corruption are not only possible but probable. And it means that the ever-present human desire for excitement is now becoming a dangerous need.

Speculating about the grisly possibilities in the Foster case has been a fascinating activity. But today’s myriad rumors are a canary in the mine, and they have broken into full song.