There is a moment, somewhere in the fourth hour of Joe Rogan Experience #2539, when four men who have never filed a story in their lives circle back to the Delphi murders — the two girls dead on the trail, the confession the State held for years and paraded at last in a shape that satisfied no one who had followed it — and begin, stoned and unhurried and circular, to worry the thing the way a dog worries a bone the family has agreed is finished. I listened at two in the morning here in Baltimore, the ashtray full, the coffee cold, and found myself, against every instinct I have spent sixty years training, nodding. Not at their competence, which was nil. At their appetite. The appetite to keep asking after the room has decided the asking is done.
This is the thing the j-school deans cannot tell you, because it would unfrock them. Journalism was never a method. It was a hunger with a deadline lashed to it. The method arrived later, tacked on like a necktie, to make the hunger respectable enough to invoice.
I do not know what happened on that trail, and neither do the four men on the tape, and it is their not-knowing I mean to sit with a while, because they are groping toward a mechanism that is the whole American suspicion compressed to a single reflex. A crime occurs. The State investigates, which is often to say it hires the arsonist to appraise the fire. It announces, with the grave face of a clerk who has read the statute but not the room, that the matter is closed. Then the years pass, and the record keeps its silences the way records do — not from cunning, mostly, but from sheer inertia, the bureaucratic patience that outlasts any citizen's attention.
This is the part the podcast has right without knowing why it is right: the official account fails not because a conspirator is clever but because the machine is indifferent, and indifference, to a grieving public, is indistinguishable from malice. I have watched this Republic fail to fill one pothole on North Avenue for eleven straight summers. A government that cannot manage asphalt is not thereby proven capable of masterminding a murder — but it is proven capable of producing the confusion in which every citizen writes his own cover-up, and no two of them agree, and the disagreement is louder than any confession could ever be.
So I will not sneer at Rogan and his jesters, though sneering comes to me without effort. My quarrel is with myself as much as with them, and it is a quarrel about the ratio. We stumbled onto such things sober and filed six hundred words by deadline; they stumble onto them stoned and file four hours of tape. The appetite is identical — it was always identical, and the discipline was half pretense. But the discipline was the tax we paid for the standing to be believed, and belief is the hinge on which a suspicion swings open into an inquest instead of settling back into a mood.
Drop the tax and you keep the hunger and lose the leverage. The four of them may circle the case until sunrise and move nothing, because the tape produces the sensation of inquiry without its cost — it stirs the citizen precisely so that he need do nothing by Tuesday. I felt the stirring myself, nodding in the dark, and I am not sure the feeling was a fraud. Perhaps the value of an appetite that grips nothing, subpoenas nothing, files nothing, is that it keeps the question warm for whoever comes next with hands free enough to use it. I do not know.
I have spent my life converting every asking into a knowing by the end of the paragraph, and tonight, for once, I would rather leave the asking where it is, unpaid, and let it cost me the ending I would have preferred.
