107 1/2 Washington Street

The New England Republican scours the web and finds a transcript of a news conference demonstrating the feeding frenzy by the media over the "Bush Went AWOL" non-story.

Compare this to the media coverage (or lack thereof) of Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" and other questionable stories from Kerry's four months in Vietnam. Ask yourself why there's such a difference. Remind yourself that you already know the answer.

The blogosphere is moving too fast for me to keep up with John Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia confabulations, his campaign's unconvincing (or outright bizarre) responses to the logical problems presented by the story (in all its permutations), and the blogosphere's dogged determination to get to the bottom of it all. I'll just point you to Power Line and Captain Ed, who have been doing the sort of work we should be seeing from Big Media.

What fascinates me about all this is the central figure himself--John Kerry--a man who built his campaign around his four months in Vietnam, and then can't seem to understand why people are calling his Vietnam stories into question. In short, Kerry was lying on every occasion he mentioned spending Christmas Eve, 1968, across the border in Cambodia, being fired upon by the Khmer Rouge, and listening to President Nixon declare that there are no American troops in Cambodia. This was the event that was "seared--seared" into his memory--the even that turned him from gung-ho soldier to embittered war veteran. Except it didn't happen.

What causes someone to invent a story that is quite obviously a lie, and stick to it with such determination for so many years? The story was most famously repeated on the floor of the Senate in 1986. Why didn't anyone then point out that Nixon wasn't president in December, 1968? Why didn't someone tell Mr. Kerry that in 1968, the Khmer Rouge wasn't yet a player in the region? How did we let him pass off this lie since, apparently, the late 70s until as recently as July of 2004?

Perhaps the better question is what psychology is at work in this man?

It is, perhaps, an odd thing to state that I am fascinated by the phenomenon of lying. Specifically, big lies. When you combine great big lies with an enthusiastic fervor to spread them and a stubborn determination to stick by them regardless of their transparent nature, the armchair psychoanalyst in me begins squirming with giddy anticipation. I want to know what makes these people tick.

Today I was reminded of an article I read way back in 1991. I'm convinced there's a connection between the kind of man John Kerry is--psychologically speaking--and the kind of people discussed in this article.

The veteran's story was horrifying. As Edward re-counted his experience of watching a buddy's head explode during a firefight, the other vets in the therapeutic group for post-traumatic stress disorder nodded understandingly. Of them all, Ed's Vietnam tour had been the most harrowing. His vivid reliving of wartime events in therapy left both his therapist and himself exhausted emotionally. The therapist had recommended the vets' group as a way to help Ed cope.

A close buddy from the vets' group decided to cheer Ed up by staging a surprise party for his birthday. A little amateur snooping around revealed that Ed's parents lived nearby, and the friend gave them a call. "What?!" said Ed's mother. "He's in a veterans' recovery group? But . . . but he was rated 4F. He never was allowed to go to Vietnam!"

Ed's friends were angry, believing he had lied to them. But he remained adamant he'd been to Vietnam even after being "exposed" as an obvious hoax. Was there another explanation? His therapist, in talking with a colleague, discovered there was.

The article explains that 1 out of 12 Americans is susceptible to creating a memory out of thin air--and then believing it himself. This is referred to as the "Grade Five Syndrome."

One of the early pioneers in researching so-called "brainwashing" techniques is psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel, an expert in hypnosis. Spiegel discovered from numerous studies that between 5 and 10 percent of the American population are not only more susceptible to suggestion, but also exhibit a number of other intriguing characteristics. He labeled such individuals as "Grade Five Personalities," based on scores they achieved in a measure of hypnotizability called the "Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP)."

"The HIP is based on a brief series of simple tests and measurements including eye roll and arm levitation," notes Dr. George Ganaway, director of the Atlanta-based Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders. "A person graded two on the scale is considered mildly hypnotizable. Grade fives are what we call the 'hypnotic virtuosos.'"

Anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern, writing about Spiegel's study of "Grade Fives," remarks

These subjects exhibit a posture of trust, "an intense, beguiling innocent expectation of support from others". . . In the therapeutic context, this behavior is translated into a persistent demand that "all attention and concern be focused on them."

The article continues:

Grade fives are particularly vulnerable to something Spiegel calls "the compulsive triad." The first point of the triad, compulsive compliance, is a fancy way of saying that in a trance state fives feel an all-but-overwhelming urge to comply with someone suggesting a new or variant viewpoint. The second leg of the triad, source amnesia, means basically that the five who comes up with certain information is unable to recall where the information actually came from. The third element, rationalization, occurs when the grade five encounters logical opposition to his or her adopted viewpoint.

Mulhern:

Grade fives' highly empathetic abilities make them particularly vulnerable to introspective therapeutic techniques. For example, when they are asked to probe their memories for additional details concerning a particular remembered image or event, Grade fives compulsively respond to their therapists' requests by adding information from various sources into their memories to "fill in the blanks." Researchers found that although these subjects ignore the sources of confabulated details, when questioned about the fallacious information, they make enormous efforts to fit the imagined material logically into the ongoing narrative of their recovered and reexperienced memories.

From there, the article continues discussing the implications of this study in the context of "recovered memories." But let's pause and consider how the description of these "Grade Fives" fits in with what we see in Candidate Kerry. He's come up with a doozy of a story which we must assume he believes himself given all the times he's retold it. Furthermore, he piles on the details to "fill in the blanks," even though it's those pesky details that are causing all the problems.

It's always the details that cause the problems. Had Kerry remained vague about Cambodia (to name only one problem area) he probably wouldn't be in this predicament. But by giving a specific time (Christmas Eve), and mentioning Nixon and the Khmer Rouge by name, he reveals the falsity of the story. His campaign's efforts to cover for him have only made it worse. For example, Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan gave us this explanation:

''The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol ... in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam.''

I realize that geography is a weak spot for some people. Still, I would expect a refutation that doesn't require redrawing national borders. Get out your maps, folks, and look at where the Mekong Delta really is.

Another explanation is that Kerry was running a series of "black ops" missions into Cambodia in January or February of 1969, involving Navy SEALS and CIA operatives--stories which have also been refuted by people who know better. The point is that piling on the details to add veracity to a lie only make the lie more obvious.

But more importantly, what psychology is at work here? When you get right down to it, is it all about narcissism? Or is that too simplistic an explanation? Does the "Grade Five Syndrome" factor in somehow? I'm still trying to collect my thoughts.

So it appears that we're not left with morality winning out over murderousness.

And here's the line from the review I found really chilling:

Baker makes you feel as if you are indeed inside the mind of a potential assassin. Whether you want to go there is your choice.

Okay, imagine this scenario. An unbalanced individual--say Michael Moore--reads this book, and already convinced that George Bush is a bad guy is convinced by the narrative that Bush must be assassinated. So he does it.

Should Nicholson Baker be considered an accomplice? Should the publishing company be held liable as well?

But hey, those are just academic questions. The anti-Bush climate in this country is at a point where it's not such a stretch to imagine there will probably be an assassination attempt--not by al Qaeda, but by an American citizen gone round the bend. My biggest question is "WHAT THE HELL WAS KNOPF THINKING!"

I suspect that if the novel was set in 1865 and was a conversation between John Wilkes Booth and a friend, I might find it interesting. When an event like that lies so far in the past, it becomes a sort of academic study. But given the current political atmosphere, publishing this book is irresponsible.

I read this article--Ten Challenges to Anti-War Politics--back in 2002 when the US bombed Afghanistan out of the stone age and back into modern times. I read it again as we went to war in Iraq. I recommend it again now because the questions it poses are timeless, and exactly the sort of thing to keep in mind when responding to anti-War critics.