Understanding Brian Williams (this is not a movie)

Sometimes a lie isn’t a lie — a deliberate attempt to deceive — but an honest mistake in memory. We’re especially vulnerable to remembering what didn’t happen if the emotional experience was strong enough to outweigh the mere event. How we felt rings clearer than what transpired. That happened to me recently.

A few months ago I had to get a special medical test at a new clinic way out on the S.E, fringe of Calgary. The wild frontier, especially as we live near the N.W. edge.

Everything appeared to go well enough, my looming mortality considered. But three days later a wild animal (a cougar, I believe. Four legged.) was seen prowling the area. That clinic was put into lockdown until the cougar was shot dead. That changed everything. I felt I’d just had a new mortal threat.

Normally I’m hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the threat of being eaten alive. (The neighbourhood dogs don’t count. I’m not paranoid. Really.) But here a wild hungry cat and I were in the same space. She could probably smell my scat. We were separated only by time. I would have been the beast’s buffet had she popped over three days earlier. Or if I’d come three days later — a later booking, a postponement, trouble finding a parking space, whatever. I felt I’d survived a rare danger. This is where I enter Brian country.

There was Brian, obviously feeling insecure being flown in a helicopter in a very dangerous location (i. the sky; ii. where people are shooting up at helicopters). He later learns a plane had been shot up roughly in that time and place. There was I, feeling imminently mortal for my medical test, anxious about traversing civilization to get there on time, and I later learn about a danger of which I hadn’t been aware. Same difference. 

The emotion of fear blurred out the fact that neither of us actually experienced the threat, but we remember it anyway. In time we remember the threat not as remote but as lived.

So don’t feel bad, Brian. It happens to the best of us (you, me). Of course, I’m not a journalist, supposedly reporting the facts. But it happens to the best of us.