Who is Deep Throat and who cares anyway?

I became a journalist at 15. I got hired by my local newspaper to cover high school sports in southern Minnesota. I covered football, basketball and track in 13 counties during the academic year. Every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday night would find me at the newspaper with four or five other peons, writing two paragraph stories about high school competitions until 3 or 4 in the morning. I'm sure it was a violation of child labor laws and I could never have done it if I wasn't attending an "open" school that allowed me to come in every day around noon.

And I loved it. I loved the writing. I loved talking to people, getting the story, choosing the words, glorifying the everyday. I really loved everything about newspapers. I loved the sloppy, cheap atmosphere. The smoke-filled rooms and the reams of newsprint spewing out of the teletype machines. I loved the smell of photo-processing chemicals. I loved the absurd camaraderie that occurs when diverse writers join together making something out of nothing and filling a news hole. Yeah, it wasn't world-shattering, but it was important to our readers and we knew it. We certainly heard about it when we were wrong.

After three years of sportswriting, I headed off to University and got a job in production on a college paper and enrolled in "J school" -- that's a Journalism major, to those of you not in on the lingo.

This was after Nixon resigned. Woodward and Bernstein were being hailed for saving the nation with their Watergate reporting. J-schools were filling up with young, starry-eyed boys and girls hoping to become the next American Hero. Journalism and its effects seemed "Important" with a capital "I".

Such a glorious concept. And a load of crap, of course.

Now, thanks to a Vanity Fair article (sorry, can't find the link!), we know that the man who directed Woodward and Bernstein's reporting in a way that revealed the depths to which the Nixon White House had sunk, was just another embittered Washington insider named Mark Felt.

John Nichols describes the revelation in his blog:

In hindsight, we should have known that Washington Post writer Bob Woodward's source for the investigative reports he and Carl Bernstein wrote about Nixon-era corruption would not be an idealist who sought to expose a corrupt presidency. Rather, like so many of Woodward's sources over the years, W. Mark Felt was a consummate Washingtion insider. Far from being someone who feared for the Republic, Felt was a protégé of longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover.

On the other hand, it is that very human quality of bitterness and self-aggrandizement that has revealed the truth on so many issues.

Let me digress.

When I was involved in the movement against intervention in Central America, it was discovered that the FBI was conducting secret investigations of a group I was a member of, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). The reason we found out? One of their moles got pissed at the FBI for not paying him what he felt he deserved, so he revealed the secrets. Just plain human selfishness. Nevermind that his activities directly led to the deaths of Salvadorans who sought refuge in the U.S. He wanted his money and he wanted it now. Secrecy and the U.S. government be damned.

That's the amazing thing about our country. The truth can come out for all the wrong reasons, and yet it eventually does come out.

Which reminds me of Leslie Marmon Silko's extraordinary book Almanac of the Dead. Silko teaches us that you don't have to be an exceptional human being to make a difference. Revolution will come from ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary places who simply say, "Enough!"

Basta. Basta ya!