Saturday, February 07, 2015

On a Different Planet



In case you have been on a different planet the last few days, NBC anchor Brian Williams has been caught red-handed telling a whopper.  Several times he has told a dramatic story about being in a helicopter under enemy fire when he was covering the war in Iraq.  Turns out, it was some low-level NBC crew members instead, and he was a good hour away from the scene.  Somehow, in the telling, over time it became Brian himself, bravely ducking bullets and risking life and limb to cover the news.

Cartoonists, late-night-show comics, and photoshoppers are having a field day ridiculing him.  Williams is shown popping up in all sorts of outlandish situations—taking Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, wading ashore with McArthur in the Philippines, killing Osama bin Laden, even cuddling Baby Jesus in the manger. 

I’m not defending Brian Williams, but he isn’t the first and won’t be the last to star in a fable of his own making.  I don’t know if it is actually in the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” but it is not that uncommon of a mental quirk.  You want to be a hero.  You came close to being one, or close to someone else who was.  You begin to imagine yourself in that role.  You begin to flesh out the story.  It gets better and better.  You try it out on people.  It goes over so well, you begin to believe it yourself.  The more you tell it, the more real it becomes.  After a while you have convinced yourself.

Examples abound.  Some years ago the Reader’s Digest published an inspiring story about a young Dutchman who supposedly had worked in the underground during the Nazi occupation.  He had escaped suspicion by posing as a harmless retarded person as he spied on the Germans and, among other things, passed along vital information to allied bombers.  At one point he had been captured, interrogated, and tortured, but never broke.   The Germans gave up; no way could this dumbkopf  be a spy!  It was such a terrific story that people brought it to the Digest’s attention, and the editors fell for it completely.  Then people who knew him read it and ratted him out.  The editors ran an embarrassed retraction in the next issue.  They said the real tragedy was that he had come to believe it himself.

There are hundreds of phony Vietnam War heroes.  There is even a book,”Stolen Valor, about the phenomenon.  A typical “hero” served in the motor pool in a rear area but claims to have won the Silver Star in a jungle firefight.  Some of these would-be heroes are scam artists, deliberately using their stories to bilk the government or gain some advantage in life.  Some are barroom blowhards that nobody pays any attention to.  But some have rehearsed their story so many times that it has become real for them—and, sadly, for others.

My mother had an uncle in East Texas who was gassed in the trenches during World War I and enthralled all his relatives with his stories.  They were genuine; he died after a while because of the massive injury to his lungs.  The whole family missed his stories, especially his brother Ed.   When the family would get together, Ed would tell his brother’s stories.  After a while, Ed began to tell them as if they had happened to him.  It made a much better story.  When he moved to Oklahoma, he continued telling his stories.  The family knew what he was doing, but the new neighbors didn’t.  He married an Oklahoma girl who loved these stories.  Nobody clued her in.  By this time Ed had come to believe it had all happened to him.  Years later, he died, and his wife said she was applying for a widow’s pension from the War Department.  Then somebody finally told her.

So when I see Brian Williams, I hear Uncle Ed.

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