The Trouble with Truth

On the belt-way to Milbry and Sara's house, some 48 kiloms north of Rutlan, we talked about getting wed. I lay back in the seat of my car and through the roof watched the December snow fall--making plans with only half a mind for moving from my Nork apartment, deciding whether to keep both cars, arguing whether the commute to Nork took 40 or 45 minutes, choosing a sex for the baby. Mostly I was thinking about what Sara had said about the Sun. I'm a Reporter, after all.

When the car locked onto the exit tramway and started deceleration, I suggested that we go to the Argus office first. Her apartment was just upstairs anyway. "We had better," I said, "have a little talk."

The demand sensor of the radiant heater in front of the Argus building was, as usual, out of order, so we didn't linger. Sara pressed her ID bracelet against the night lock and the door swung open with a squawk that lifted my hair.

Once when I asked her why she didn't get it fixed, she said it saved the price of a cowbell on a spring. I told her then that Vermont had no business in the 21st century, and she said the 21st century had no business in Vermont, the 19th had been more fun. Fun! She said if I didn't like Vermont I could go back to Nork, and she gave it the old fashioned pronunciation, Newark, I suppose just to irritate me. As I recall, I did go back to Nork, that time, but that was a long time ago.

This time, anyway, I pushed her gently down into her chair, the worn old oak swivel chair in front of the disreputable old rolltop desk, with that battered old electric typewriter of her father's and her grandfather's. For all I know, her five-great-grandfather Elias Witherill started the Argus with it in 1847, two centuries ago.

"You say the WPA is bad," I said. I tapped the typewriter. "There's your real villain. And there--" pointing at the ancient offset press she printed the Argus on and waving at the framed, yellowed copy of Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Argus, hanging on the wall--and "there!"

Maybe the actual beginning was the manuscript of the ancient monks: impersonal and uniform. But handwriting was hardly wide-spread in the Dark Ages, so let's take it from the typewriter.

Handwriting was an individual thing. Transcribed speech; and speech is an individual's articulated thought. Printing is based on handwriting, but it's stylized and made uniform for mass production.

That leaves a big gap between script and print--the difference between personal mental process and a merely mechanical process of duplication.

Look at it this way. In the days when handwriting was general, a man believed a personal message if it came from someone he trusted. And he'd know it came from that person because he recognized the handwriting, just as he'd recognize the person's voice, or his face. The writing was, in effect, an extension of the reader's own senses or experience, into a distant situation.

Then with better communications came more handwritings, and more distant situations. Then the typewriter, and then the dictatyper. Everybody's writing was just like everybody else's, and there was a lot of it.

Everything was in type, even the identifying name at the end of a personal letter, the autograph ("Signature," Sara snigged) ... signature, then. For a long time businessmen's letters had been signed by their stenographers anyway. ("Secretaries, blockhead," Sara muttered, and she sighed.)

The point is, I continued, that except for a few cases of eccentricity--I glanced at her belt pouch, with the pencil in it--handwriting had disappeared. The written word--the reader's distant experience--was in type: dictatype, teletype, phototype, printer's type ... newspapers, books, advertising, business letters, memoranda, personal letters, everything.

Before, people had tended to believe most of what was handwritten, and almost nothing that was in type. With everything in type, they got tired of deciding which to believe and began to believe either every word, or none. It wasn't good.

It led to the Edict, and of course to the World Press Association and its relentless search for truth.

"Gah," said Sara. "Truth is an overrated commodity. Let's go upstairs and get ourselves something to eat."

Ii

Her voice was muffled coming from the jon. But I knew she was reading from a document she kept framed there, and I knew well what it said.

No person, group of persons, organization, or governing body of any town, city, state or nation existing under the articles of this federation, shall print, or cause to be printed, or knowingly permit to be printed, or disseminate or knowingly permit to be disseminated any word, phrase or work, excepting only certain scientific treaties of explicit speculative nature as hereinafter defined by statute, that is not both wholly and in part demonstrably true.

"Great Judah," I heard Sara say. "What a disaster!"

"Stop muttering and come out here," I shouted. "You said food."

"I'll be with you in a minute. I'm almost finished undressing." Since we weren't expecting company I had already hung up my coverall--a new though serviceable one of diaphragm-weave thermoplast, bought especially for Vermont and warranted for 30 degrees below.

With or without the chiton and hose she favored over coveralls, Sara was a handsome woman. Strong, straight and, I knew, a fit mother for our children. But right at the moment, she was angry at me all over again.

She strode to the foodbar. "You!" she said, chucking a handful of steakpaks into the infra, twisting the dial. "You and your Edict!" she said, hurling potatopaks into a pan of hot water and yelping when the water splashed on her thigh. "You and your stupid, buzzing, clicking, inhuman WPA!" she said, filling milkpaks with water, cramming them into holders and slapping them sloshing down on the table.

"You talk about type and belief and truth. Truth! You have the gall to keep on parroting those same old defenses about that electronic scrap heap you have the effrontery to call a--a Greeley! Elias Witherill thought Horace Greeley was a rotten newspaperman, but rotten or not, he was still too good to have that whining junkpile named after him.

"What does a tangle of wires know about newspapering. What does WPA know about writing a story? What do you know about news?"

"Now, Sara," I said.

"Don't now-sara me, dammit. You still fail utterly to realize that news is more than just what happened, when, where, to whom, how and why. It's what might still happen, even what might have happened otherwise or never did happen, if that's part of the story.

"The Edict forbids every bit of it!

"But most important, news is expressed--and this you simply cannot see--expressed in basic human terms, designed to arouse the basic human curiosity or sympathy that makes an abstract description palatable to people. If you like, it tricks people into informing themselves. The Sun, your wonderful Sun, sticks to facts and statistics, and make a hurricane dull. It doesn't tell about people, it lists numbers!

"Real news has, by God, Heart! Without it, a newspaper is just a list, a long, long list that ... nobody ... will ... READ!"

"Okay," I said. "Okay! This is better?" I tramped over to a framed Argus front page down the wall from Vol. 1, No. 1, that was dated April 17, 1904. She started to protest, but I overrode her. "Listen to this," I said. And read from a story given prominent play on the page:

Gentlewomen swooned in the crowd that quickly gathered at the corner of South Main and Elm Streets, so near had tragedy come to that little girl, Irma Littlefield, aged four, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Adoniram Littlefield of 324 Elm Street, that afternoon. Men wept unashamedly when little Irma, lying crumpled in the dust, stirred her tiny limbs and opened eyes of deepest blue, even as her shrieking mother flew to the side of her baby.