They Must be Lying – I Saw it on TV

nobility and goodness of mankind, and like my family and almost all my neighbours, I was once again willing to believe in my heart that whatever these icons of the public trust on TV told us was the absolute truth – after all, these were the same folks who gave us the news every night, every single evening around the dinner hour, so we could find out what’s happening in the world, what to think about, how to judge those people over there, over here, anywhere. I’ll never forget how proud I was watching man walk on the moon, my 10 year old heart bursting out of my chest, feeling so lucky to be alive at that time and watching it on TV. This was a huge “frozen moment”.

There are other mental snapshots which of course remain quite vivid in my mind. Robert Kennedy & Martin Luther King assassinations, the war in Vietnam that spanned my entire childhood, the Nixon Watergate hearings, Iran Contra. It could not enter our mind that anything we saw on television could be any less than the gospel truth, because we live in the Western hemisphere, the best, most noble hemisphere on this planet. Just ask Walter Cronkite, or Dan Rather, or Ronald McDonald, or Barney the Friggin’ Dinosaur – any talking head that props up in a medium shot while occupying the standard 4 by 3 aspect ratio, mind-inhibiting confines of this ribald human invention. They must be telling the truth – gotta be real, after all, “I saw it on TV”.

Jump to Sept. 11th 2001.

I’m sitting in my office when a news bulletin flashes on my computer screen and I’m alerted to the 9/11 attack in NYC. As if by some secret homing mechanism, my workmates also wander outside of their respective cells and converge in the communal coffee area – and so it

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