Poe writes, “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told . Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.” Shortly after midnight on Jan 20, something happened. I know this. I also know that this community is reeling from an “incident.” It is an “incident” because no phrase better prevents me from libel; I know no more stable ground.

I am a journalist. As such, I hold sacred a certain intuition about the future and the past. The past is certain; it is at least knowable if not known. It is what I report. The future is unstable, unknowable, to be reported. This is how it was supposed to go.

I feel, instead, that I have been asleep, that this intuition was always a dream. On Jan. 20, I woke up to a phone call describing a maelstrom the night before, of baseball bats and comas, melee combat of mythic proportions, a clash of cultures.

The project of “Truth” is to proceed backwards through all this. It is a search for origins, and witnesses, “what happened” and wherefore. But our world falls too fast for muckrakers. I blinked and Truth had shattered, its parts crystallized, refracting the past violently and in all directions.

“We have known freedom’s price,” said President Bush as he closed his address on Jan. 23. “We have shown freedom’s power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory.” A certainty of what is yet to come, and then the local FOX station turned our attention to Guilford. Their pivotal source was a student who claimed to have seen the incident.

“It was crazy,” he said to FOX, and nothing more. At least it was a fact.

The ravishing onslaught of corporate media attention helped to ensure that any seamless portrait of Truth would dissolve. In its place has arisen a mosaic of forceful and agenda-laden “truths.” And we are all responsible for this – those of us who have shouted, who have whispered, who have said nothing at all.

Institutional administrators, athletes, white anti-racists, and anti-racists of color (and of course those hybrid anti-racists who are also administrators), now police the boundaries of their tiles, their truths on this mosaic – in open forums, closed meetings, public statements, leaked letters, and unauthorized fliers. The future is guaranteed and the past is made to serve it.

Activists, Guilford’s cherished Mercenaries to the Good, cry out again for “change” (but for how long); and they know what change means because they know what happened.

The administration, of course, has declared Guilford’s “allegiance to the truth.” They have promised, “The integrity of (the judicial process) will result in justice.” And they know that this will happen because their truth is neatly compiled in a stack of witness statements and medical reports, none of which mentions the War on Terror.

What will the historian of the future write about the incident on our campus? Will the “altercation in Bryan Hall” be a footnote, the xenophobic byproduct of an endless criminal war? Or will it be a shining example of the triumph of “rational, inclusive discourse” and “due process”? It depends on what he wants to prove, I suppose.

Politics everywhere. Everywhere politics. And I am a journalist. I report. I am a journalist, an historian of the present if you will. As such, I am compromised, because, unlike so many others it seems, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.