When I read about the Defense Department’s plans for my future security, why do I feel so insecure?
The New York Times privileged us the other day with another dispatch from what we used to call — back in my days as a toiler in the journalistic trenches of Chicago’s teeming neighborhoods — the Iron Triangle: that tight configuration of news bounded by reporter, editor and source, into which extraneous concerns, such as what the reader might care about, are never allowed to penetrate. We worried about the Iron Triangle in those days. It yielded only half-stories, the “official” half, dry, pat, seemingly innocuous.
Such grind-’em-out stories are more than the products of a beat reporter’s hardened routine. They’re a default conspiracy on the part of a closed system, involving all parties concerned, to dictate what matters, and are frustrating enough, from a reader’s point of view, when they emanate from the local school board or police department. When they emanate from the Pentagon . . . well, uh, this is about the future of the human race, bitten off in chunks half a trillion dollars at a time.
