Some hacked and published secret Syrian government emails reveal how American journalists toadied up the criminally murderous Assad regimes, father and son. They did so, the journalists piously declaim, in order to provide the American public with a look into the regimes, a look they would not otherwise get. Yet what they got for their pains was propaganda, what the American public was fed was a view that the Syrian government wanted us to see and hear and accept, a view that was totally false, and which the American journalists knew was false. And yet they reasoned, if we tell the truth, we will no longer have access to the government. But to what end is that access? To report the truth, or report the propaganda? The problem of reporting only what the dictators want you to hear is that you are essentially in a hall of mirrors, where nothing is reality. T. S Eliot wondered if the spider, in a wilderness of mirrors, would suspend operations, and would the weevil delay. They would not, and neither would our journalists.

The spider does not cease its toil

Nor weevil doth delay

The daily round of endless work

That won’t admit of play

But weevils have no mirrors and

The spider in the grass

Sees not the world as we do see

When we look in the glass

The mirror sees what we do not

Reflections are not real

We see but dimly in the dark

What only mirrors feel

We see light of a thousand suns

And think only of doom

We see a sickly child but not

The mother in his room

Reflections sear bewildered minds

Kaleidoscopic, burnt

Into our souls in all their strength

Expunging all we’ve learnt

The spider soon will cease its toil

The weevil slowed at last

The mirrors tell of what’s to come

As told of what is past