The Secrecy Disease

In his recent session with Britt Hume, in which he explained away hitting an aged hunting companion in the head, neck, and chest with birdshot fired from a shotgun, Dick Cheney's concluding statement was that the greatest problem afflicting the country is the failure to maintain secrecy.

Yet, when he wants to get on a safe subject, his partner, G.W. Bush likes to trot out the importance of education.

Education is the giving of information.

Secrecy is the withholding of information.

Therefore these two men are talking out of both sides of their twisted mouths, and that's one reason why the Government that they head is in such an impaired and corrupt state.

In an atmosphere of free and open giving of information, humans are at their best. In an atmosphere of giving no information and lying, which are pretty much one and the same, humans are at their worst.

It's no accident that so many bad movie plots turn on characters not telling others things, when to do so would be far from the end of the world. That is the work of lazy writers and directors, just as a secretive and therefore bad government is the work of trifling administrators.

In better days that are not that long past, a popular expression was, "letting it all hang out."

A sure sign that even our supposedly free and open media outlets are sleeping at their posts is that you no longer hear that kind of virtue extolled much.