By PLS
I’m sitting here with a somewhat red face over the Little Red Book incident.
Today, having just returned from a Christmas week immersed in family, I learned that the story about the student in hot water for ordering Mao’s Little Red Book via inter-library loan was a hoax. I’d used this egregious example of domestic surveillance in a post just before Christmas, and I’d used it with confidence because it had appeared in numerous respectable sources, sources with lots of fact checkers on the payroll.
So a post I’d labored over isn’t entirely discredited, but it’s disfigured, like a beauty with a zit on her forehead, to say the least. So I’m embarrassed. But I’m also angry.
Why did so many of us fall for this very clever deception?
We’d just learned that NSA has been spying on tens of thousands of American citizens without a warrant. We’d been reading that the administration wishes to perpetuate the more egregious clauses of the PATRIOT Act. And so on. We’re well on the way to Orwell’s 1984, twenty years late, perhaps, but all too real nevertheless.
The real travesty is that the hoax was so plausible in the America that has been created by the Bush administration.