I still can't bring myself to read the news, so I'm contenting myself with rereading a favorite novel, and found this quote:

not guilty

From Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, the protagonist’s cousin, responding to his discovery that Richard III did not murder his two nephews in the Tower of London, says this:

It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It raises some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they reject it and refuse to think about it.

Tey wrote that in 1951 concerning a myth that has endured since 1485, yet she could just as easily been referring to any number of great myths, from the Boston Massacre; to “Remember the Maine” ; to “there are some fine people among the Nazis”; to global warming. All of which would have disrupted Tey’s storyline, of course, but the point is, human nature hasn’t changed.