Plato’s guy Socrates tells us about a bunch of people forced to live down in a cave where they can only see the shadows of others passing behind them, carrying objects reflected by firelight. They compete to see who is best at naming what the shadows represent. Finally, somebody gets free and goes up out of the cave into the sunlight, where the brightness is painful. Gradually, that person adjusts to the light and comes to realize that what he sees now is the real world that he previously saw only through shadowy reflections in the cave. He hurries back down to spread the word, but it turns out they’re not interested and prefer to continue guessing at the shadows.
For two years, we’ve been guessing at what will be in The Mueller Report and forming opinions about it based on what the best guessers have told us. Now, the report is out, but nobody wants to take the time to read it, so we just go on letting other people tell us what we want to hear about what’s in it.
The greatest significance of The Mueller Report will turn out to be that nobody reads it. Our nation faces a crisis, and our system provides a mechanism to deal with it, to get at the truth of what has happened and what to do about it. We spend time, money and effort to find out the facts, but nobody cares to know what they are. What could have been a revelation will more likely be our epitaph.
We’re more comfortable in the cave. Nobody wants to take up the daunting task of reading the truth. We’d rather continue arguing over the reflections shadowed our way by puppeteers who know how to pull our strings. That’s a pity. The Mueller Report is a masterpiece of an anomaly. It is an evenhanded, clearly written recitation of facts. There is no attempt to tell us what we ought to think about those facts, but every effort made to help us understand their context.
The best thing about the report is that it lays out in chronological order everything we have heard in recent years in bits and pieces, without the competing spins and interpretations. It extracts the facts from the whirlwind of headlines, rumors, lies and behind-the-scenes manipulations and arranges in an understandable account what people actually did, to the extent that impartial investigators can determine.
Right now, we should declare another national holiday weekend, with no television, radio or, oh, OK, newspapers, during which everybody reads the report. And, really, nobody should be allowed to say a word more about it until he or she has read it. Hell, it’s just like the Constitution. Everybody talks about it, but nobody reads it. More’s the pity. The report is a good read. Among all those legal minds are some good writers, doing for Mueller what Coleman Barks does for Rumi.
The Mueller Report is the very opposite of bullshit. It is a legal decision, rife with footnotes and explanatory asides and right-there-on-the-page weighing of the evidence and telling you why this was decided instead of that. The report is a meticulously clear-eyed attempt to reveal the truth, to cut through the obscurantism that permeates our civic discourse.
Most importantly, this document is eminently, painstakingly, bend-over-backwardly fair, even to those who tried the hardest to confound and deflect the inquiry it records.
The point of the whole thing, of course, is to examine Russian meddling in our 2016 election, and the report unequivocally spells out just how that happened through cyber attacks and large-scale disinformation campaigns that expertly used our prejudices against us. Nobody is talking about that, of course, in our hurry to cherrypick gotchas to throw around the cave.
Let’s give The Mueller Report the highest accolade of all: It is a first-rate piece of investigative journalism, a thoroughgoing attempt to interview sources and test the veracity of their answers through indefatigable documentation of facts presented in an accessible narrative free for public consumption. It is as if Socrates has come back down into our cave to shine the light of reality into our shadow world. Of course, we know what they did to him.
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