Hans
Christian Andersen understood bad rulers. "The
Emperor's New Suit" doesn't end with everyone
acclaiming the little boy for telling the truth.
It ends with the emperor and his officials refusing
to admit their mistake.
I've
laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen
failed to publish, describing what happened after
the imperial procession was over.
The
talk-show host Bill O'Reilly yelled, "Shut up!
Shut up! Shut up!" at the little boy. Calling
the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the boy's
house and "surprise" him.
Fox
News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial
clothing, then buried reports discrediting these
stories. Months after the naked procession, a
poll found that many of those getting most of
their news from Fox believed that the emperor
had in fact been clothed.
Imperial
officials eventually admitted that they couldn't
find any evidence that the suit ever existed,
or that there had even been an effort to produce
a suit. They insisted, however, that they had
found evidence of wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related
program activities.
After
the naked procession, pro-wardrobe pundits denied
that the emperor was at fault. The blame, they
said, rested with the C.I.A., which had provided
the emperor with bad intelligence about the potential
for a suit.
Even
a quick Web search shows that before the procession,
those same pundits had written articles attacking
C.I.A. analysts because those analysts had refused
to support strong administration assertions about
the invisible suit.
Although
the imperial administration was conservative,
its wardrobe plans drew crucial support from a
group of liberal pundits. After the emperor's
nakedness was revealed, the online magazine Slate
held a symposium in which eight of these pundits
were asked whether the fact that there was no
suit had led them to reconsider their views. Only
one admitted that he had been wrong - and he had
changed his mind about the suit before the procession.
Helen
Thomas, the veteran palace correspondent, opposed
the suit project from the beginning. When she
pointed out that the emperor's clothes had turned
out not to exist, the imperial press secretary
accused her of being "opposed to the broader war
on nakedness."
Even
though skeptics about the emperor's suit had been
vindicated, TV news programs continued to portray
those skeptics as crazy people. For example, the
news networks showed, over and over, a clip of
the little boy shouting at a party. The clip was
deeply misleading: he had been shouting to be
heard over background noise, which the ambient
microphone didn't pick up. Nonetheless, "the scream"
became a staple of political discourse.
The
emperor gave many speeches in which he declared
that his wardrobe was the "central front" in the
war on nakedness.
The
editor of one liberal but pro-wardrobe magazine
admitted that he had known from the beginning
that there were good reasons to doubt the emperor's
trustworthiness. But he said that he had put those
doubts aside because doing so made him "feel superior
to the Democrats." Unabashed, he continued to
denounce those who had opposed the suit as soft
on sartorial security.
At
the Radio and Television Correspondents' annual
dinner, the emperor entertained the assembled
journalists with a bit of humor: he showed slides
of himself looking under furniture in his office,
searching for the nonexistent suit. Some of the
guests were aghast, but most of the audience roared
with laughter.
The
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
oversaw an inquiry into how the government had
come to believe in a nonexistent suit. The first
part focused on the mistakes made by career government
tailors. But the second part of the inquiry, on
the role of the imperial administration in promoting
faulty tailoring, appeared to vanish from the
agenda.
Two
and a half years after the emperor's naked procession,
a majority of citizens believed that the imperial
administration had deliberately misled the country.
Several former officials had gone public with
tales of an administration obsessed with its wardrobe
from Day 1.
But
apologists for the emperor continued to dismiss
any suggestion that officials had lied to the
nation. It was, they said, a crazy conspiracy
theory. After all, back in 1998 Bill Clinton thought
there was a suit.
And
they all lived happily ever after - in the story.
Here in reality, a large and growing number are
being killed by roadside bombs.
Topplebush.com
Posted: November 4,
2005
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