Is Mano Singham Spreading an Urban Legend?

Two weeks ago, Mano Singham - a nuclear physicist at Case Western University – took it upon himself to investigate the factual basis of David Horowitz's claim that a student at the University of Northern Colorado had been politically persecuted by her professor. After completing what Singham considered an exhaustive research process, he concluded that Horowitz's story of the persecuted student was most likely an "urban legend."

"[T]here are some characteristics of urban legends that this story shares, in particular the absence of details (names, places, dates) that enable one to pin it down to anything concrete," wrote Singham in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of March 4, 2005.

Singham turned out to be wrong. The story was no urban legend. Singham's inability to verify the facts did not mean that Horowitz had invented them. It simply meant that Singham's investigation was inadequate.

Singham's Double Standard

Gentle reader, I hesitate to go where my curiosity now tugs me, lest I end up making an insinuation as reckless and presumptuous as that which Singham made against David Horowitz. Even so, my love of truth compels me.

I think we can all agree at this point that David Horowitz is not trafficking in urban legends. But what about Dr. Singham? As I perused his blog, the following passage caught my eye. Singham writes:

"In a previous posting I described the disturbing phenomenon that so many Americans seemed to be living is a reality-free world. I argued that this was because they were being systematically misled by people who should, and do, know better.

"Further support for my somewhat cynical view comes from an article by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind that appeared in the October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine and that deserves to be better known because of the light it sheds on the extent to which the current administration is ideologically driven. His article has this chilling anecdote:

`In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

`The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."'

"What you have on display here is a world-view that is so arrogant that it believes that it has the power to create its own realities."

Judging from this report, the "senior advisor" in question sounds very much like a cross between Darth Vader and the Marcus Crassus character played by Sir Laurence Olivier in Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus. If indeed, any "senior advisor" to President Bush is swaggering around Washington exuding arrogance as pathologically inflated as described herein, I am forced to wonder why any reporter - especially one as notoriously hostile to the Bush administration as Ron Suskind – would protect the man's identity.

Mr. Suskind may argue that this "senior advisor" spoke off the record. But if Mr. Suskind really heard such a delusional rant from a top presidential aide, would not his obligation to the American people outweigh his obligation to his source? Does there not come a point where duty to one's country supersedes duty to one's career and to one's professional associates?

Evidently not, in Mr. Suskind's view.


Professor Singham, Say It Ain't So!

Another possibility, which we would be naive to overlook in the age of Rathergate, is that the encounter Mr. Suskind reports with said "senior advisor to Bush" may not have occurred at all – or at least not in the way that Mr. Suskind would have us believe.

In the same scholarly and dispassionate spirit with which Dr. Singham "investigated" David Horowitz's story of the persecuted UNC student, I pored over Mr. Suskind's piece in the New York Times Magazine, searching in vain for any hint of the identity of this psychotic "senior advisor to Bush." But alas, the text yielded no clue.

Like Dr. Singham before me, I had reached a dead end. Only then did I realize, with an odd flash of deja vu, that Ron Suskind's anecdote evinced certain "characteristics of urban legends… in particular the absence of details… that enable one to pin it down to anything concrete."

Could it be, I wondered, that the story of Bush's power-mad "senior advisor" might be nothing more than an urban legend? And could it be that Dr. Mano Singham would publish such an urban legend on his blog, presenting it as fact, without first verifying the story through his own independent research?

Surely not.