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Thursday, August 25, 2005

blah blah blah

I've been having a series of interesting (to me) and revealing (to me) discussions with various people about the Fran Gallegos situation. What I think is interesting is that people assume that questioning the various motives of Gallegos' critics somehow translates into questioning her guilt. I have always found this kind of thinking to be really lazy and divisive. It's as if somehow political discourse, public discourse for that matter, has been reduced to "you're either with us or against us." It's like the Red/Blue crap. My own personal politics are all over the map and when people make assumptions about my "liberalism" it makes me want to yawn. When people assume that a person is either in one camp or another it makes me question their own ability toward critical thinking. It is, in fact, possible, to just not care one way or the other about outcomes but be interested in the big picture, or the little micro questions, in the macro of the situation, in the meta of the details. There is more to a story than "guilty or innocent", "right or wrong." Isn't there?
To me this type of thinking also is indicative of just how confused and murky journalism has become on the one hand and how one-dimensional and decontextualized it has become on the other hand (and if I had three hands I'd really have something interesting to say).
Fact: I have no idea what the truth of the Gallegos situation is. On the Occam's Law tip I'd say she clearly has screwed up more than once and if, as the JSC posits, it's blatant and patterend then it shouldn't take them too long to show that pattern of errors definitively and put this all to rest. I was puzzled, in court, about the differing interpretations about what these "amended abstracts" represent. I've read everything written about these abstracts at least 10 times and I'm still not sure I get it. This isn't literary interpretation, after all. We're not arguing about what the "Red A" means. Why is it all so confused?
I am interested in all the facets of the situation. I think it's interesting that the JSC commissioner is married to Richardson's political director. It makes me wonder if Richardson gets first-hand information on this situation through Amanda Cooper. It makes me wonder if Jim Noel is politically motivated to make an example of Gallegos as part of Richardson's "you drink you drive you lose" campaign. Or to make a name for himself for future political aspirations. Does this mean he's not right? No. But his motives are not irrelevent information in my view. They are part of the whole story. I'm also interested in the fact that, from what I can glean from the daily papers, it was a new mexican reporter who called the cops in the first place when the papers from gallegos' court were blowing in the wind. In my mind this translates to the reporter becoming part of the story, and yet the new mex never made that clear. Should the reporter have called the cops? I don't know. But if he did he should have made that clear in the story. Possibly he shouldn't have written the story. At bare minimum, someone should be asking these questions. Does that mean it wasn't fishy those papers were blowing around in the first place? Of course that's fishy. But I guess I don't have an automatic hierarchy about information. I think it's all part of the picture
Now, there are those people who think none of this matters, that the only thing that matters is that gallegos screwed up and damned the motives of anyone. They say, who cares about the issue of anonymous sources; who cares about the mechanics in the reporting of the story; the motives of the whistleblowers; the vehemence of Gallegos' critics; the entirety of how our judiciary works; the interconnectedness of the political situation. Who cares about the larger context.
I guess I do.
But you know, I'm a weirdo from way back.