How ‘truthy’ replaced truth following 9/11

OCCASIONALLY the right man is at just the right place at exactly the right time with precisely the right tools, and something of real value results.

This is one of those occasions; Frank Rich is that man, and his new book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina,” will be of particular value to those still struggling to bring this historical moment into focus.

Week in and week out, Rich writes what is surely American journalism’s smartest and most original newspaper column for the Sunday New York Times. Its organizing principle is a deceptively simple one: Draw the connections between and among popular culture, mass media and our politics, and chart the way these increasingly indistinct spheres of our national life act one upon the other.

It’s a devilishly difficult thing to do without slipping into incoherent trivialization. Rich pulls it off because he brings to the task not only a seasoned reporter’s keen political sense but also a distinguished background as a theater, film and television critic. He has, in other words, all the right tools to chronicle an era in which the theater of politics is all encompassing.

He also has a genuine relish for popular culture and has almost single-handedly made the word “truthiness,” first coined by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, an indispensable political term of art. As Rich defines it, “truthiness” describes a situation in which it doesn’t matter whether something is true: “What matters most is whether a story can be sold as true, preferably on television.”

That describes precisely the stories George W. Bush and his surrogates told the American people to induce them to support war in Iraq, and Rich lays out these evasions, exaggerations and outright lies in “The Greatest Story Ever Sold.”

Regular readers of his column will find much that is familiar here but also a great deal that is factually and, more to the point, contextually fresh. As he recently told an interviewer: “There’s certainly tremendous overlap, but the fact is, when you’re writing a column, you don’t see the larger picture. I really wanted to write a narrative more than an argument. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, a lot of stuff was hiding in plain sight. Some of it I saw at the time, some of it I didn’t.”

All of the stuff that counts is in “The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” marshaled in a narrative that unfolds with the cadence of a well-paced newspaper column. There’s also a shrewdly observed and reasoned explanation of the motives behind all this horrifically destructive deceit -- and Rich is clear in his belief that one of the casualties of the ill-considered war in Iraq has been the real war on real terrorism, which is as serious and avoidable as a fight can be.

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz and the rest of the neoconservatives who came to Washington as intellectual props for a stunningly ill-prepared and “incurious” president brought with them an ideological belief that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, needed to be remade. Karl Rove, Bush’s political prop, brought with him a single-minded loyalty and an unparalleled mastery of campaign -- which is to say, media -- technology. Those qualities converged in the run-up to the first midterm elections following Sept. 11 and the failed attempt to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

As Rich puts it:

“For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons that predated 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable ones. We’d go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons.”

The story was better than true; it was “truthy.”

Rich is particularly apt in setting the torpid cultural/political context through which the 9/11 atrocities tore like a jagged rip in a pre-digital film reel. It was, he reminds us, a summer and fall dominated by shark bites, the lackluster Gary Condit scandal and a sentimental boom in World War II nostalgia. Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” was on the bestseller lists, and Jerry Bruckheimer’s “vapid ‘Pearl Harbor’ ” was in theaters. (Rich points out that, at the time, Hollywood tracking polls showed that the film was “better known to most Americans than Pearl Harbor, the historical event.”)

This was of a piece with the politics, because “though Americans were fond of saying that they valued authenticity in their politicians above all else, they didn’t really mean it.... For all the differences between the Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney administrations, they formed a boomer continuum. Each was ruled by narcissists who wanted what they wanted when they wanted it and were convinced of their own righteousness. Clinton and Bush were masters at using the sweet-talking language of ‘compassion’ ... as a rhetorical substitute for, say, expending political capital to bring medical insurance to poor children.

“And so the Clinton-Bush boomer generation turned a nominally selfless tribute to its fathers’ generation not only into a lucrative branch of show business, but also into an implicit, cost-free celebration of its own worthiness. By exulting in our parents’ wartime service, we could practice what the writer John Gregory Dunne labeled a ‘virtual patriotism.’ ”

It also was a period in which an increasing share of the American public passively acquiesced to the provision of virtual news. Over the last five years, Rich argues convincingly, the news media’s performance has been generally dismal -- by turns, supine, credulous and confused. He singles out a number of hard-working “blue collar” print reporters on his own paper and elsewhere -- and particularly in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau -- for their reportorial skill and courage in the face of their editors’ timidity.

He is hard on a number of the stars -- rather diplomatically so in the case of his former colleague, Judith Miller, and far more bluntly so in the case of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

In Rich’s appraisal, though, the Bush administration’s more consequential connections have been in the electronic media:

“It was in the mid 1990s that the American electronic news media jumped the shark. That’s when CNN was joined by even more boisterous rival 24/7 cable networks, when the Internet became a mass medium, and when television news operations, by far the main source of news for Americans, were gobbled up by entertainment giants.... In this new mediathon environment, drama counted more than judicious journalism.... Once definable distinctions between truth and fiction were blurred more than ever before, as ‘reality’ was redefined in news and prime-time entertainment alike.

“The Bush White House certainly did not invent this culture. It has been years in the making and it is bipartisan. But this administration was the first to take office after it was fully on-line and was brilliant at exploiting it to serve its own selfish reality-remaking ends.”

If our public conversation still were capable of making any distinctions but partisan ones, the sheer moral force of Rich’s argument and the logical weight of his evidence would lay to rest the casual conservative canard that he is, somehow, an avatar of rarified Manhattan liberalism, writing in a language that is foreign west of the Hudson. As this book so clearly demonstrates, the very heart of his project as a writer and public intellectual is nothing fancier than a rugged old American belief that facts matter and a fierce old American resentment at being conned.

It’s hard to imagine values more traditional. It was, after all, a Republican president from the heartland who once mused, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

There’s the faith of our fathers for you -- and the proposition to which “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” is well and truly dedicated.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com