I simply can't stand those idyllic, sterile images on yesterday's post when I opened up this blog this morning. For one thing, they are already staring back at me right outside the window. Sure, it's pretty here, but I don't need pretty.
Guess I need gritty. Thus, it was with gusto that we got burritos at our favorite local haunt last night. My sons just love this place, all three of them. My littlest daughter is off burritos right now, so I cooked her own favorite -- pasta.
It's springtime, and the big investigation of our mysterious water leak is wrapping up, apparently like many criminal investigations, inconclusively.
We may never know.
This may prove harder on my neighbor, who is detail-oriented, combative, and lawyerly; than on me -- disorganized, distracted, and disinclined to waste precious energy on fights of any kind.
I'm focused on the fight for my life itself. That's enough.
Spring is also science project time. Many years ago, when we were writing our textbook, Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story, my colleague Dan Noyes and I advanced the hypothesis-driven method of journalism that we and many others preferred.
It's a tricky business, this hypothesis methodology. You've got to have some basic evidence that indicates some sort of pattern plus a suspicion, an instinct, a guess about what you'll find if you keep searching.
Your worldview deeply affects the process. This is why the endless battles over whether "the media" has an ingrained liberal bias, or conservative bias is both ludicrous and vitally important.
A conspiracy theory is not a hypothesis, and it can't really be investigated, which has frustrated many who wish reporters would try to substantiate their theories. My generation was frozen at the moment JFK was assassinated. We were shocked as if by a cattle prod.
When we awoke and recovered our senses, we started smelling a conspiracy. How could something like this have happened without a conspiracy? As years passed, even though no credible evidence emerged to substantiate any of the wilder theories, enough provocative details became public to keep the conspiracy fires burning.
Oliver Stone exploited this skillfully, imagining how the conspiracy might have unfolded in his movie, which has shaped subsequent generations' views about the event. That he patched in real footage, including the home movie footage that is the only known visual evidence of the shooting, made his docudrama feel more realistic than it was.
If you ask people, say, in their 20s today about the assassination, they think it was seen on television as it happened. But that is incorrect: there was no footage at all, and we never saw a thing until a decade later, when the somewhat graphic home movie of Kennedy's head exploding was finally first exhibited for the public.
The trouble with sticking to the facts is similar, whether you are a journalist, a lawyer, a cop, or a scientist. All you can do is stay alert and adjust your hypothesis in light of new evidence. You can't afford to get wedded to any one hypothesis until and unless the preponderance of evidence becomes overwhelming.
In the aftermath of 9/11, I was hired as an investigator by some of the victim's families, who believed the U.S. government had been at least negligent and possibly complicit in that tragedy. I still have large files on the case, and I read most credible books on thee topic, which means currently, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.
Wright is an interesting guy; his memoir of growing up in Dallas contains his vivid description of the almost palpable shared sense in that city in 1963 that something was going to happen. A collective sense something dreadfully exciting about to happen hung in the air.
His first reaction to the murder of the President, he writes, was relief. At last, something did, in fact, happen.
The horror off it sank in later.
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