Brugge Blog

I enjoy the times when insights found in a book show examples of themselves in the world of the moment. I’m reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, where Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective finds himself using his convalescence time in a hospital to uncover the truer story of Richard III - he has gone done in history as a villain, but Grant sees a picture of him that suggests otherwise. All popular historical accounts are in agreement, but he and a cohort dig deeper and discover items strangely missed by earlier historians.

When he confides this alarming discovery to his cousin in a letter, she responds that a story like that is nothing new.

“It’s an odd thing, but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale, they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.”

Cut to the news stories about Jessica Lynch, the US Army person held briefly as a POW by Iraqis. There is a biography due out, and made-for-TV movie about to air that trumpet the heroism of those who freed her, and the demonic acts of those who held her. The only problem is that Jessica is saying that the press and US military are making much of the story up.