The story of Lara Logan is first and foremost a personal
tragedy. A decent woman, a South African by birth, an American by
adoption, trying to do her job as a television journalist, is
cheering for the street rebels in Egypt to unseat the old order.
Suddenly the disorder becomes the occasion for her sexual
victimization at the hands of the wanton mob.
It is terribly sad that this happened and terribly
fortunate that she
survived with her health and most of her dignity. Still, in a
way the more profound tragedy is the naïveté she brought to that
scene. Here is Logan’s assessment, in her own words, of what she
knew about Egyptian society before her ordeal and what she
discovered afterward, as
rendered by the New York Times:
Before the assault, Ms. Logan said, she did not know about
the levels of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other
countries regularly experienced. “I would have paid more attention
to it if I had had any sense of it,” she said. “When women are
harassed and subjected to this in society, they’re denied an equal
place in that society. Public spaces don’t belong to them. Men
control it. It reaffirms the oppressive role of men in the
society.”
This is worth pondering for a long moment. We are not talking
about a blithe tourist who was gulled by the shiny brochure,
surprised at the brackish water coming from the hotel faucet. This
is a woman whose job is world news, working at a major national
network which spans the globe with its coverage. There is no source
of information on the planet to which Lara does not have easy
access.
And with all this, she tells us in a heartfelt plaint - in
the kind of monologue where a person may be trusted to bare her
innermost truth - she had no sense of the fact that women in Arabic
cultures are harassed and subjected to abuse. She did not notice
that public spaces in those countries do not belong to women. She
failed to observe that men control those spaces, exercising an
oppressive role in society.
Respectfully, and with sensitivity to her pain, I must
express my astonishment. I knew all those things she just
described, and I knew them long ago. So did every single one of my
colleagues at this magazine and at every similar publication. I
would venture to say that the vast majority of our readership knew
all this as well. Not because we entertain prejudices about members
of other races, but because we are trained observers of
reality.
The question is as obvious as it is painful: inasmuch as
Lara Logan is every bit as well-trained and as knowledgeable about
the world as the journalists at The American Spectator
et al., how could she profess ignorance of such a
blatant, patent, palpable, flagrant phenomenon?
The answer is not an original thought of mine. It was
expressed in the popular culture by the story of The Emperor’s New
Clothes. People can be maneuvered into missing obvious truths by
peer pressure, conventional wisdom and wishful thinking. When
personal experience intrudes jarringly, eyes dulled by a film of
willful ignorance are opened wide. Then the proverbial liberal who
gets mugged starts thinking conservatively. The mark who gets taken
takes a second look at his givens.
Logan’s new awareness is echoed immediately by the
celebration of Bin Laden being summarily executed in his courtyard
and bedroom rather than being brought to the courtroom. Suddenly
everyone in Manhattan and Hollywood and Burlington and Berkeley
knows what we know everyday. At least, they know it for today. That
is good news, as far as it goes, a great relief to those who feared
we would walk blindly into oblivion.
Still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we
would be better served by the governance of those who can tell the
Emperor’s fur from his chest hair.
