It continues to amaze me how the military (see, e.g., Jessica Lynch) and the FBI (the G-man stereotype) are so adept at turning the most discombobulated, random, messy and disjointed series of screw-ups into clean, smooth narratives — and how the media eat them up. Do they employ screenwriters to convert their epic foul-ups into plot lines we recognize from TV?
In yet another instance of this phenomenon, the story of how we came to apprehend the suspected Times Square bomber is starting to appear much less straightforward and far more bumbling than the initial reports yesterday.
Maybe it’s our fault for actually believing that succeeding militarily or in police work is an inevitability born of hard work, perseverance, smarts and a little timely good luck. We know things don’t work that way in our own ostensibly routine lives yet we’re willing to believe that’s how they should work in circumstances — war and crime — that are even more chaotic, unpredictable and adverse.
I’m left wondering if the real problem is public relations flacks protecting their bosses by spinning tales of derring-do that make everyone involved look good but bear little relation to reality — or if instead the problem is our collective desire to deny that reality and be spoon-fed a steady diet of too-good-to-be true narratives that make us feel good.
