Straight Guy Nowhere Near Damascus

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.

Now comes the revelation that Amina Abdallah Arraf, the widely cited blogger “Gay Girl in Damascus,” recently said to have been detained by the regime, is (or, I suppose, was) in actuality a 40-year-old American male graduate student (in history!) named Tom MacMaster, currently residing in Scotland. Evidently it comes as a belated surprise to a graduate student in history that falsification of authorship confounds the search for that elusive quiddity that historians are pleased to call truth, even if with a lower-case and not a capital T.  Someday, however, a cultural historian will be interested in MacMaster’s rationale as a tidbit toward understanding the mentality of his time....

There’s a lot of talk about how the Internet compensates for the unreliability of bourgeois (or, if you like, liberal) media, leaves those geezer communications just where they belong in the dead-tree dustbin of history, because after all it imposes no filter, no gatekeeper, no flattening editor. It shoots straight. Well, here we have Exhibit AAA in the way in which a putative revolutionary claims an exalted standard—aka a license to lie—and in the process not only discredits his own lying enterprise but makes it harder to trust the many other bloggers who (honestly, so far as I know) are trying to contribute to the history of their times....