Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Many years ago, I was one of those “accident victims” swatted off the back of my bike by a truck. Decades later, I read the witness statements, which ranged from descriptions of the murderous truck driver howling with bloodlust as he gathered himself to run me over again, to my having thrown myself under his innocent wheels in a suicidal passion. The point being, same happening, different takes. Reports on Day 14 of the Trial of the Millennial Epoch (TOME) offered a similar phenomenon. The same set of events written up in headlines on two continents revealed Lord Black as either a geriatric freak who, as a result of his suffering from bronchitis, almost drowned while snorkelling off Bora-Bora (Globe and Mail), or as a terrorist target urged by his concerned colleagues to use the company jet to fly to Bora-Bora where he would strip to the waist, revealing himself to be a geriatric freak, etc. (Telegraph). While I realize that the TOME is more than an exercise in epistemic haymaking (men’s lives are at stake), that headline writers from these august publications could have such wildly varying perspectives on what actually matters makes you wonder, what on earth are the jurors—17 ordinary Chicagoans, good and true—making of all this?