Fractured Fairy Tales
link Jason Gay: A Snap Judgment on Cutler – WSJ.com.
In the last playoff game that the Chicago Bears played this season against the eventual SuperBowl winner Green Bay Packers, the starting quarterback, Jay Cutler was taken out of the game. He was benched not for poor play, which would be understandable, but because of an injury he suffered to his leg. Not having a leg to throw against is fairly serious for a quarterback because their mobility is required in every play.
For some reason, fans and players alike were quick to jump on Cutler and accused him of not being tough enough and not wanting the big game enough to play through the pain. Football is arguably the most macho and gruelling of all professional sports since the odds are great that a body will be hit hard on every play. Even players from other teams who were not at the game felt entitled to criticise Cutler. Cutler quickly became a despised villain.
As it turns out, after the game was over, doctors confirmed that Cutler had suffered a torn MCL in his knee. This is a serious injury which threatens one’s ability to walk, much less play contact football. It’s been almost a month since that event, the SuperBowl has been played and the incident may have been forgotten.
Except for the legend. Twenty years from now, if Jay Cutler achieves nothing else in his career, people will always remember him as the quarterback who bailed on his teammates during the big game notwithstanding that he sustained a legitimate injury. The media stories, the chatter and the record is set for life. Even now, people are using his name as an adjective, as in ‘don’t go Cutler on me’, in reference to bailing out of a situation with a flimsy excuse.
This kind of unfairness is seen time and time again in many other fields of pursuit, notably politics. As most informed people know by now, the predominantly left leaning media can frame an image or position on someone they don’t like and similar to the Cutler illustration, it becomes the truth and is hard to dispel. In 2003, George Bush was giving a speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln about the state of the war in Iraq. Unbeknownst to him, someone had placed a huge banner behind him which read ‘Mission Accomplished”. To this day, people will claim that Bush gave a speech claiming preliminary victory in Iraq. No such thing happened.
Of course the most well known fib about Bush is the weary canard about him lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If they say it enough, it becomes the truth to those too ignorant, lazy or ideologically partisan to check the facts.
During the famous 2008 federal election, Sarah Palin was tagged with the line in which she claimed to be an expert on Russia because, ‘you can see them from my house’. In fact those words were uttered in a satirical skit on Saturday Night Live by Tina Fey. What she actually said was in response to a question by the brilliant Katie Couric about the importance of Alaska’s geographic position to America’s defence. She responded by saying ‘of course it’s important, you can see Russia from Alaska’, which of course is true. However, years from now, the line of ‘you can see Russia from my house’ will be attributed to her as if it actually happened.
In his recently released memoir entitled Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld makes the point of how media can wilfully distort facts to suit their agenda and in doing so, may cause actual harm. It was widely circulated at the time that prisoners in Guantanamo were treated horrifically and were subject to all kinds of torture, physical and mental. Newsweek reported an incident in which a copy of the Koran was flushed down a toilet. Anyone who tries to flush a book down a toilet will know that it’s impossible, so that was one hint already as to the veracity of the story. In any case, this story was a complete fabrication, it never happened. But it served to mobilize the crazy left to demonize the practices at the prison camp enough to push for closure of an important military tool. The moral here is to not believe something just because it’s in print. There’s an old saying which can be paraphrased here. There are lies, damn lies and then there’s the news.