Why do so many otherwise intelligent people maintain that life can be understood in simplistic black and white terms, when the truth is so patently obvious: real life is filled with nearly infinite subtle gradations of gray? One reason is that forcing everything to fit a predetermined, predigested view makes life easier, while rendering our complex, confusing, and crazy world at least somewhat more comprehensible, not to mention less scary. Religious fundamentalists and political fanatics have done this for ages. Doubt or confusion for these people is minimized or even eliminated; they know what and what not to do at any given moment, who their friends and enemies are, who and how they are allowed to love, what to eat, what to wear, and ultimately, what will happen to them after they die. It all sounds very comforting, even appealing.

The fascinating, disturbing movie "Capturing the Friedmans" illustrates this phenomenon. In this film, released several months ago, we meet the Friedman family of Great Neck, New York. The father (Arnold) and middle son are charged with multiple acts of rape and sodomy of boys who took computer classes in the Friedman's basement during the 1980s. The title of this movie is perfect, because although the Friedmans may be "captured" -- by eldest son David's video camera and ultimately by the police -- the truth, or at least the reality of what really happened in this case, is never captured with any degree of certainty. Arnold Friedman receives child pornography in the mail, but that doesn't prove that he and his son Jesse are both child rapists.

According to the police, the judge, and most of the Long Island community, the Friedman case is black and white, open and shut, even before the evidence is examined. By popular consensus, Arnold Friedman is no longer the respected and even beloved computer teacher everyone had thought he was, but a depraved and evil monster who must be guilty of these horrible crimes.

Like the Great Neck community that accused and convicted Friedman, our current president is a prime example of the black and white worldview. This is a guy who, even from insider accounts like Bob Woodward's and David Frum's, possesses abysmally little intellectual curiosity or understanding about the world in which he lives, particularly when the particular issue cannot be framed in black and white terms. As "Dubya" himself has stated proudly on numerous occasions, he is just a straight-shootin' Texan who "knows what he knows" and has "absolutely no doubts." Well, having no doubts may be fine in a religious or political fanatic, but in the president of a great nation, it's just plain frightening. At least it should be frightening to the citizens of this great nation.

President Bush's mindset is that the answer can be known before one even has critically examined the evidence. This mindset says that it is all right to distort and mislead, even on an issue as important as war, because he believes the end justifies the means. To put it bluntly, this is warped and profoundly dangerous. Whether or not the Iraq war was justified to remove a dangerous despot -- and it very well may have been -- is irrelevant to this discussion. It is completely unacceptable in a democracy to have a White House that sends its minions to pressure intelligence analysts, manipulates facts, misuses intelligence information, misleads the Congress and the public, and in so doing, convinces the country to follow it into a war.

In "Capturing the Friedmans," the Friedmans' guilt is determined in the complete absence of physical evidence, with no credible experts or eyewitness testimony, or even a fair trial. Mainly, we have here, at best, questionable "repressed memories" coming from boys under intense and highly biased questioning by the police, as well as tremendous pressure by parents and peers to "remember" something. What we do not have are records of any abuse complaints filed by even one boy's family during the entire time all this rape and sodomy supposedly occurred. Apparently, out of dozens of boys and their families -- hundreds of people total -- nobody noticed anything amiss while all these horrors supposedly were taking place. So much for all that innocent until proven guilty stuff. Details, details.

As we now are finding out, the details of George W. Bush's pre-war intelligence on Iraq were highly murky and far from black and white. It contained nuances, doubts, dissenting opinions, and shades of gray regarding all the relevant issues: Iraq's possible links to terrorist groups; the status of its weapons of mass destruction program; and the likelihood that the country posed an imminent threat to the United States. In fact, the most likely scenario now appears that Iraq had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, had few if any direct links to Al Qaeda, and possessed no ability to threaten the United States anytime soon. The "Black and White" House removed all doubts about the evidence in its hell-bent desire to remove Saddam Hussein, and its need to sell this war to the American people and the world. For the Bushies, only one answer was acceptable: Iraq posed a clear threat that needed to be disposed of, immediately and by force. Doubts and caveats be damned; let's roll!

As the movie points out, both Arnold and Jesse ultimately pleaded guilty, but what does that prove? A fair-minded person, one willing and able to allow for complexity, contradictions, and subtle gradations in life, might understand such pleas in the context of the situation. Great Neck, like much of the United States in the 1980s, was overcome with child sex-abuse witch hunts. Arnold understandably tried to sacrifice himself in to save his beloved son from jail. Meanwhile, Jesse, who was only 18 and an emotional wreck, was under tremendous pressure from the police and his lawyer to cut a deal and to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Given the community's hysteria and the near-impossibility of finding a fair and impartial jury, this may actually have made sense at the time, except for one small detail: Jesse almost certainly was innocent.

Sadly, because they pleaded guilty, the Friedmans never got a hearing before a fair or impartial jury of their peers. Well before that point, the judge, Abbey Bolkan, already had concluded that the Friedmans committed the crimes with which they are charged. As she says in the movie, "There was never a doubt in mind as to their guilt." So much for impartiality. These two are guilty and evil: lock 'em up and throw away the key.

What we have at the end of all this rush to judgment and community hysteria is a family torn apart, a community traumatized, and two possibly (probably?) innocent men's lives ruined. What we do not have at the end of all this is any sense of certainty, truth, justice, or emotional "closure." Maybe George W. Bush or some other adherent to black and white thinking, self-righteous moralism, and the drawing of conclusions in the absence of solid evidence, can explain how all this happened in Great Neck, New York in the late 1980s. Maybe the same person can also explain how intelligence information was completely distorted in order to justify launching a war against Iraq in early 2003. But for the Friedman family, for American soldiers getting shot at and blown up in Iraq, and for most people who see this movie, any explanations will likely ring hollow.

About Lowell Feld

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