Frey But Not Clinton?

I'm finding myself increasingly amused with the "scandal" involving author James Frey of Million Little Pieces and his being pilloried by the self-proclaimed-Abraxas Oprah for his "fudging" of facts and other things that he claimed were real but had actually been created. I have never read Frey. I have no plans on reading Frey. I have, however, read countless memoires as well as autobiographies and other "based on a true story"-type writings that have served each to tell a particular tale. We're finding that Mr. Frey has taken certain liberties with the facts, which I am still puzzled as to why a man who wrote a book becomes a pariah while a man who runs a country doing the same thing gets prayed for at my old church in Fresno. The politics of memory is a growing field of study within history as the topic serves as a fascinating and as-yet untapped source for inquiry: just what do we write down and why? Can motive be determined from an outside source? Just when does perspective become more than just that and serve as bias or prejudice or propaganda (even for the self)? The biggest book prior to Frey's supposedly well-written tome is My Life by the 42nd and now dearly-missed president William Jefferson Clinton, ne Blythe. As the former president's life can be more easily fact-checked and therefore verfied, how do "we" know that what Bill recorded as his version of the past is actually the accurate past or his memory of it? In the truest post-post-modernist sense, how can ANYTHING be considered (not true but) factually correct? We'll argue "truth" later because, as we know, something does not need to be necessarily factually correct to be true, but because filters, perspectives and biases change over time, how can anything written down about something in the past be considered genuine? At thirty-two, I can write about my first love and yet, what might that say about my current status based on, say, a diary of the same person ten years ago? I'll tell you that in ten years from now, my interpretation on that same person will be even more different than it is now than it was ten years ago then from the time I actually loved her. The point of all of this is this: just how valid can first-person experience be, especially when the elements of time and motive are weighed? My brother is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the politics of memory in the Reconstruction-era South; already he should be able to crank out a second paper analyzing the Bush Administration's actions by comparing fact and "truth".
I hereby promise that I will never encourage my son to tell "the truth" when confronted with a possible consequence but strictly a recreation of prior events based on his singular and fallible perspective and memory, with omission of all spin, bias and judgment as possible. I'm in for a long haul.

Tonight, as well as tomorrow night, I'm off to catch the Derek Trucks Band. I love this band in the exact opposite way I love Springsteen; I want little to no information regarding setlists, gossip, status or anything else about this band. The DTB remain the one, last mystical experience I have in my life. I want to see the band, I want to experience the music and the experience of seeing them, I want to see the guys that I happen to know from that amazing summer of 2000 and catch up and then I want to leave them without trying to understand or contextualize anything. My catching this band will move into the double digits after this weekend and I can close my eyes and describe an earth-shattering experience from each performance. The most recent being a year ago tomorrow was the band's performance of Greensleeves, in which I can still remember seeing people inexperienced with this band with mouths agape, heads shaking in disbelief, long-time followers dancing and obeying and myself standing still against a pulsating rhythmic beat from the keys, drums and bass, wondering just how in the hell a group of young men could create a sound that can truly not be described by words. I wish for just one little treat like this at every performance; I get shaken to my knees every time. The next two nights will probably not be much different. Report upon return.