Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation. We focus on “the facts of the case,” as described in a judge’s opinion, and then we describe the way the court applied the law to such facts as doctrine, hardly pausing to note the irony of this ex cathedra image, smacking of infallibility. Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

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"...the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact."

I just watched President Obama’s Cairo speech.   It’s not a very pretty piece of writing, but it has an impeccable quality.  I’d equate it with a Henry James novel or a shaker chair – all is all plan, intention, and the shrewd distribution of energies.  I’d love to learn more about the process that went into crafting it, as the prose shows evidence of long contemplation and final polish.

That said, remember that this speech is really not for Americans: beware of any analysis of this oration that is not based on how it sounds in Arabic, Persian or Urdu.  For instance, I feel certain that the reason that the speech uses the term “extremist” instead of “terrorist” has something to do with translation, not ideology.  Of course, virtually none of the opinions that we read in the West will be based on foreign language versions, so the meaning of the speech has been reduced to a parlor game.

But it’s a smashing good parlor game, and one with implications.  In fact, the interpretation of Obama’s speech proves one thing: politics thrives on treating speech in a dishonest way, because commentators keep asking burning questions about words, yet they paradoxically refuse to pursue answers, even when there exists obvious ways to find these answers.

Consider, for instance, this response to Obama’s speech, an exchange between Liz Cheney and James Zogby on CNN the other day:

CHENEY:  What I thought was new and particularly troubling was the juxtaposition. You know, when he talked about the Holocaust and horror of the Holocaust, but then in the very next paragraph, when he was done with the Holocaust, he said, on the other hand — and seems to equate the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust, the murder, the slaughter of six million Jews to the situation in which Palestinians live today.

And I think that — that, you know, goes way too far. And I know he was trying to sound even-handed, but I think that begins to be very much appalling, frankly, to a lot of folks and walking away — putting some distance in the relationship with Israel.

ZOGBY: Clearly not and not intended as such. He was playing out the historical narratives of both peoples. This is why Jewish people suffer. This is why they’re afraid. This is why they have a feeling that they are insecure. This is why Palestinians have suffered. This is why.

Okay, this is little more than a dog-and-pony show.  But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the purpose of this exchange is to understand what the President really means, what he thinks about the world and intends to make of it.

With this in mind, consider what Cheney is suggesting: for her, the idiom “on the other hand” is a connective phrase that contains a fully-developed intellectual proposition – when people use this phrase, she suggests, they promulgate the idea that the preceding subject and the succeeding subject are equivalent in a moral sense.

So let’s imagine that I said: “AIDS is sad; on the other hand, dysentery is sad.”  According to Cheney’s reasoning, by employing the phrase “on the other hand” I have consciously proposed that AIDS and dysentery are equally deserving of lament, as if sadness is to be justly meted out in equal portion to sufferers of each disease, and this notion may be questionable by campaigners who specialize in HIV prevention or water treatment initiatives.  You could say that I have “elevated” dysentery to the status of AIDS, or vice versa, and then get all huffy about it, if we follow Cheney’s way of looking at things.

This turf battle would not exist if I instead said something like “AIDS is sad; also, dysentery is sad,” or – even better – if I discussed AIDS and dysentery in two separate speeches on separate occasions.  That formula would presumably not imply any provocative moral equivalence.  Now that’s what Zogby is saying.  For him, the phrase “on the other hand”  is merely a signal that tells listeners “okay, that’s one story; now I’m moving on to another story.”  This reading imputes little meaning to the connecting phrase – Zogby thinks that the phrase is just a marker, not a miniature argument – and so he has the benefit of simplicity.

But which reading is correct?  If an ordinary person really cared to know what Obama really meant, how could he or she find an answer?

One way you could do so would be to look to your own usage.  Personally, when I use the term “on the other hand” I seldom intend it to convey moral equivalences.  Rather, I tend to use it when I am deliberating an issue that has more than one legitimate perspective and I want to give each one equal airtime, but not necessarily equal gravity.  My usage is closer to Zogby’s model than it is to Cheney’s.  Of course, I am not infallible, and it is possible that many people use this term in a different way.  But if Cheney wants to prove her point, she would need to examine her own recorded usages of this phrase, to ensure that they conform to the interpretation that she is imputing to the President.

Another way to answer the question would be to look to the whole of the speech.  I don’t have the time to really do  justice to such an exercise, but let’s look at the highlighted paragraphs anyway:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive …

If Cheney is correct, then the sheer fact of mutual mention implies equivalence.  It matters not if one persecution is “enslaving” and “unprecedented,” while another is “humiliating” and “intolerable,” so long as the descriptions of these two situations abut one another in a sequence.  Meanwhile, Zogby is focusing on the last phrase.  His view is that Obama set out to summarize and dignify two peoples, not to engage in some historical argument that measures and compares the sums of collective suffering.  In his reading, one would imagine that the last part is the “core message” of the passage, rather than some connecting idiom in the middle of it.

There is a third way to find out the truth: by contextualizing these readings in the larger corpus of Obama’s statements and acts.  Remember that our goal is to know Obama’s meaning, what he intends to convey with words, because this gives us a window onto his plans.  If that’s the case, then it would be smart to look at a pattern in how his use of the term “on the other hand” correlates with policy proposals.  Sounds like a job for a grad student …

Of course the question does not even end there.  Ultimately, this dispute of interpretation isn’t about a speech, but about character.  Is Obama’s penchant for even-handedness bona fide, or is it merely a gesture to ingratiate himself to both sides in a dispute before he disappoints one of them?  To answer this question both Cheney and Zogby would have to present a case.  For instance, Cheney might show an instance in which Obama proposed to balance two opposing points of view, but really only helped one side to the unmitigated detriment of the other; conversely, Zogby might go through Obama’s speeches and look for other moments in which he summarizes positions of opponents without overtly aiming at moral judgments of either position.

Whew.  Okay, let’s back up and look at the larger implications of all this: my point is that there are many avenues available to find the truth, if we really wanted arguments that are illuminating.  But why on earth would we want that?  To do so would not make for very good television.  The purpose of these disputes is not to find meaning in words but to ascribe meaning to words, which is why this debate throws open a number of questions that are perfectly answerable by obvious research – which never takes place and therefore provides no answers.

That’s what’s so dishonest about this kind of political debate.  It asks questions that we could answer fairly easily, but it refuses to do so, because it is more exciting to perpetuate uncertainty than to expunge it.  By now everybody knows that the facts don’t really matter; what’s amazing is that we create great opportunities for the facts to matter and then immediately give up at the moment that the facts begin to show promise.

"...even if web of data turns out to be all its proponents want it to be, narrative won’t still be part of it, but it will be something to put on top." Problematic assumption that facts precede narratives, that narratives are something you "put on top" of or weave out of facts or data... rather than facts being distilled from or abstracted out of narratives.