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by Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 04 November 2005
Hans Christian Andersen understood
bad rulers. "The Emperor's New Suit" doesn't end with everyone acclaiming
the little boy for telling the truth. It ends with the emperor and his
officials refusing to admit their mistake.
I've laid my hands on additional
material, which Andersen failed to publish, describing what happened after
the imperial procession was over.
The talk-show host Bill O'Reilly
yelled, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" at the little boy. Calling the boy a
nut, he threatened to go to the boy's house and "surprise" him.
Fox News repeatedly played up
possible finds of imperial clothing, then buried reports discrediting
these stories. Months after the naked procession, a poll found that many
of those getting most of their news from Fox believed that the emperor had
in fact been clothed.
Imperial officials eventually
admitted that they couldn't find any evidence that the suit ever existed,
or that there had even been an effort to produce a suit. They insisted,
however, that they had found evidence of
wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related program activities.
After the naked procession,
pro-wardrobe pundits denied that the emperor was at fault. The blame, they
said, rested with the C.I.A., which had provided the emperor with bad
intelligence about the potential for a suit.
Even a quick Web search shows that
before the procession, those same pundits had written articles attacking
C.I.A. analysts because those analysts had refused to support strong
administration assertions about the invisible suit.
Although the imperial administration
was conservative, its wardrobe plans drew crucial support from a group of
liberal pundits. After the emperor's nakedness was revealed, the online
magazine Slate held a symposium in which eight of these pundits were asked
whether the fact that there was no suit had led them to reconsider their
views. Only one admitted that he had been wrong - and he had changed his
mind about the suit before the procession.
Helen Thomas, the veteran palace
correspondent, opposed the suit project from the beginning. When she
pointed out that the emperor's clothes had turned out not to exist, the
imperial press secretary accused her of being "opposed to the broader war
on nakedness."
Even though skeptics about the
emperor's suit had been vindicated, TV news programs continued to portray
those skeptics as crazy people. For example, the news networks showed,
over and over, a clip of the little boy shouting at a party. The clip was
deeply misleading: he had been shouting to be heard over background noise,
which the ambient microphone didn't pick up. Nonetheless, "the scream"
became a staple of political discourse.
The emperor gave many speeches in
which he declared that his wardrobe was the "central front" in the war on
nakedness.
The editor of one liberal but
pro-wardrobe magazine admitted that he had known from the beginning that
there were good reasons to doubt the emperor's trustworthiness. But he
said that he had put those doubts aside because doing so made him "feel
superior to the Democrats." Unabashed, he continued to denounce those who
had opposed the suit as soft on sartorial security.
At the Radio and Television
Correspondents' annual dinner, the emperor entertained the assembled
journalists with a bit of humor: he showed slides of himself looking under
furniture in his office, searching for the nonexistent suit. Some of the
guests were aghast, but most of the audience roared with laughter.
The chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee oversaw an inquiry into how the government had come
to believe in a nonexistent suit. The first part focused on the mistakes
made by career government tailors. But the second part of the inquiry, on
the role of the imperial administration in promoting faulty tailoring,
appeared to vanish from the agenda.
Two and a half years after the
emperor's naked procession, a majority of citizens believed that the
imperial administration had deliberately misled the country. Several
former officials had gone public with tales of an administration obsessed
with its wardrobe from Day 1.
But apologists for the emperor
continued to dismiss any suggestion that officials had lied to the nation.
It was, they said, a crazy conspiracy theory. After all, back in 1998 Bill
Clinton thought there was a suit.
And they all lived happily ever
after - in the story. Here in reality, a large and growing number are
being killed by roadside bombs.
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