The Times gets more post-modern every day

The Post's Joel Achenbach suggests that if The New York Times is concerned about reporting on the Plame leak for fear of...well, what, I don't know...than she should write a fictional account. The Times does this all the time.

Meanwhile, Howie Kurtz tells us that Times staffers are consternated by the paper's refusal to publish a full account of the mysterious Judy Miller situation. The simple solution is for the paper to tell Ms. Miller that she can write a fictional account, with a protagonist who closely resembles Judy Miller but has a different name, like "Jillian Muller," and who has somewhat different experiences, such as being famous for breaking the story before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein didn't actually have weapons of mass destruction.

Obviously this is a sensitive matter and we should give The Times the full benefit of the doubt as it struggles to handle the situation. But we also should remind Ms. Miller that, in a pinch, she can just make something up.

Times editor Bill Keller, speaking to Kurtz, takes a postmodernist, deconstructionist approach to the prospect of publishing a story about Miller: "[D]espite the understandable yearning for a simple parable, this is a complicated narrative involving a large cast of editors, lawyers and other officials of the paper, and involving imperfect human memories and differing points of view. We'll do our best to tell that story." Translation: We are not in the truth business. We tell "stories," which are narratives grounded not in objective fact but in the hazy, subjective perspectives of human beings who can't even remember where they put their car keys, much less what they heard from Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. To claim that a story is "the Truth" would be to lie about the nature of reality, which is not fixed, deterministic, and linear, but rather is chaotic and relativistic, with black holes at the bottom and quantum foam on top. Thus the Times under Keller prefers a more Rashomon-like narrative structure that leaves the reader uncertain about who actually did what, and when, and why. This goes beyond journalism; this is literature.