David McElroy

Cleaning out the old notebook again…

A week after a U.S. soldier murdered 16 Afghan men, women and children, it’s mostly become a non-story among people I talk with. The news stories I see have taken a tone that seems to be looking for a way to excuse what happened, asking what could have “caused him to snap” or speculating about brain injuries from previous combat.

Honestly, I’m a little tired of people looking for excuses. What if this had been an Afghan soldier and he was in this country for some military reason — training, perhaps — and he had taken a weapon to a few homes near where he was based and murdered 16 Americans. Do you think we would all be looking for things to blame it on then? Would we be wondering about how his previous injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever had made him “snap”?

No, we would have a country full of angry people who were ready to kill Afghans and and were ready to blame all Muslims for what had happened. Why can’t we understand how serious it is when we send soldiers into other countries and they do bad things?

Every time there have been instances of U.S. soldiers committing such atrocities, it seems that there are similar justifications. When are we going to learn that when you train people to kill and then dehumanize the people they’re fighting, this is what we’re going to get? And when are we going to learn that the sooner we get out of these countries we’ve invaded, the sooner we’ll quit making new enemies?

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If you kill a baby — in its mother’s womb — 10 minutes before it’s to be born, that’s called abortion. If you kill a baby 10 minutes after it’s born, it’s murder, according to our law. In a new academic paper, a pair of medical ethicists argue that the two are morally and ethically identical — and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with killing babies.

I don’t think many people would disagree that any sane and civilized society should prohibit murder. The question has been when to define a human being as attaining “personhood.” Many who have argued for the morality of abortion have generally said that a human being comes into existence only at birth, arguing that late-term abortions — in which the developed baby’s head is cracked open and destroyed — are perfectly legitimate. (Read about “intact dilation and extraction” here. This was made illegal in the United States in 2003.) Others have argued that the point at which the growing baby would be viable outside the womb is when it’s a human being.

In pretty much every moral or ethical area, I want people allowed to make their own decisions, just as long as they’re not violating someone else’s life or property to do so. I’ve argued that abortion is immoral, because at some point it’s the same as killing a baby. And since we don’t know exactly what that point is, my view is that the benefit of doubt should go to the baby — since the mother and father had to decide to take the actions that created it.

In discussing the issue, I’ve many times made the point that it’s legal in many places to kill a baby minutes before birth, but it’s considered murder right after birth. So I’ve asked why there was something about the birth process that made the baby different from what it was minutes ago. I never dreamed that anyone could use the same argument to make the case for infanticide.

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In January, the public radio show This American Life devoted an entire episode to the issue of working conditions inside the Chinese factories that make Apple products. On Friday, the show was forced to retract that entire episode. It turns out the man who reported his alleged experiences in the story made it all up.

It’s a terrible journalistic embarrassment to This American Life, and the show is devoting this week’s entire episode to outlining the errors and untruths in what was broadcast. (You can hear this week’s episode here and you can read the blog post in which the show announced the retraction here.)

To me, this is a complex story with implications for journalism, culture, business, philosophy and even politics. Let’s look briefly at the facts before getting to the potential lessons.

Mike Daisey is a performer, not a journalist. He writes and performs theatrical performances that attempt to present his ideas about life’s truths. The best of theatre, film and literature does exactly this, but it’s clear when we see a play, watch a movie or read a novel that we’re experiencing fiction that’s intended to convey larger truths. We might leave the experience gaining insight, but rarely do we believe we’ve gained facts based on the stories we’ve experienced.

Daisey has admitted in the past to mixing fact and fiction. Almost six years ago, the New York Times said this about him:

He admits that he once fabricated a story because it “connected” with the audience. After telling this lie over and over again, it became so integrated into the architecture of his piece that it became impossible to remove or, perhaps, to distinguish from what really happened. Mr. Daisey seems embarrassed by this confession, but he also pursues the issue further. Is lying acceptable when in service of a greater truth? What does truth mean in the context of art?

But this story wasn’t presented on a stage as artistic truth for a theatre audience. Daisey presented himself to the public — through broadcast news shows — as telling the objective truth of what he saw. (Take a look at what he said on MSNBC.)

When I first heard that Daisey claimed to have gone to China for about a week and come back with unverifiable tales of rampant worker abuses, I was suspicious. I’ve been a reporter, so I know it’s not easy to do what he claims to have done. It’s slow and hard work to get access to places, develop sources who have confidence in you and then find the people you need to talk to. The idea of a rank amateur doing all of that in China — without even speaking the language — in the time he claimed struck me as improbable at best.

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