Emily F. Gorcenski

Captain Jay Zeamer, Jr., as aviation historian Martin Caidin tells it, was a barely-competent aviator who struggled to earn his pilot wings and fell asleep in the copilot seat during combat missions. Eventually passing his check flight, he was hardly trusted with a fresh off the line B-17 and cobbled together a flying rig from spare parts, equipping it with a trimetrogon camera setup and a heavier-than-normal complement of .50-caliber armaments. Together with an equally ragtag crew, Zeamer’s men were known as the Eager Beavers for their willingness to volunteer for difficult reconnaisance missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Photo recon missions were nasty affairs during the war. The B-17 Flying Fortress was designed with a heavy complement of hand- and turret-operated machine guns for defense. But its real defensive might came during bombing missions, when it was flying in a combat box of dozens of aircraft, each of them with overlapping arcs of fire that would help keep approaching enemy fighters at bay. For a recon mission, aircraft were usually sent up alone without either the benefit of a fighter escort or a combat box, hoping that the single plane would escape enemy notice, even as it flew high over enemy airfields laden with fighter planes. If noticed, the lumbering bomber was usually no match for the faster, more agile fighter planes flown by pilots eager to score a kill.

It was one such mission in June of 1943 that Zeamer and his crew volunteered for, flying over the Buka airfield on Bougainville Island to take photographs that would help inform a future raid. Zeamer’s B-17, serial number 41-2666, was on a course straight and level over the airfield hoping to get high quality photographs when it was noticed by Japanese air defense, and eight fighters raced to intercept the flight.

Caiden writes thrillingly about how Zeamer’s crew with its nonstandard complement of machine guns valiantly held off attack after attack for nearly 40 minutes, the bomber receiving punishing blows of 20mm cannon rounds. Eager Beavers gunners claimed four kills while the pilots, having completed the photo pass, were finally able to maneuver his ramshackle aircraft defensively to avoid further damage. Japanese pilots had done extensive damage to the chin of the aircraft and, not knowing that Zeamer had installed an additional fixed .50-caliber machine gun to fire through the nose of the aircraft, flew lazily in front of the bomber after an attack pass. At one point, Zeamer even pushed the nose downward to gather speed, lined up a passing enemy fighter, and splashed it with his aftermarket modifcation, the fifth of five kills to be credited to “Old 666” that day. Running out of ammo after forty minutes of combat, the Japanese fighters returned home, unable to bring down the lone B-17.

Despite the punishment, only bombardier Lt. Joseph Sarnoski was fatally wounded that day. Zeamer and his copilot, however, each were so seriously injured that the turret gunner, Sgt. Johnnie Able, had to fly the aircraft nearly 600 miles to the nearest allied base.

For their bravery under fire, Sarnoski and Zeamer were awarded the Medal of Honor, and the Eager Beavers would become one of the most decorated flight crews in the history of the US Armed Forces.

This story rattled around my brain for more than two decades, when I first read it in Caidin’s book, The B-17: The Flying Forts as a young aeronautical engineering student. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a fit of homebound organizing and excessive wokeness, I donated the book along with my entire aviation history collection to Goodwill, an act I regretted almost as soon as I left the parking lot. I’d tried casually to find the story again in the last couple years, especially after having watched Masters of the Air earlier this year. The story wasn’t on the main Wikipedia entry for the B-17 and I couldn’t recall the details well enough to make a meaningful Google search. So I ponied up to buy the book again and just today started re-reading it for the first time in twenty years.

Wikipedia’s been under attack recently. Billionaire narcissist and wannabe oligarch Elon Musk has fuelled his cult following into a frenzy trying to attack the site and its nonprofit owner. The Wikimedia Foundation, for its part, has proudly leaned into these attacks, advertising during its annual fund drive that it is emphatically not for sale. Or in other words, that it is billionaire proof. Instead, right wing ideologues have renewed attacks¹ against former Wikimedia head and current NPR chief, Katherine Maher,² exhuming and selectively clipping an old conference talk she gave where she explains the philosophy that Wikipedia advocates for in deciding what facts meet the standards for community-edited articles. In the clip she explains:

But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. And after seven years there, I actually believe that they’re onto something. That for our most tricky disagreements, that seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, isn’t necessarily the best place to start. In fact, I think our reverence for the truth might have become a distraction that prevents us from finding a consensus and getting important things done.

She goes on:

Now, none of this is to say that the truth isn’t important. The truth obviously exists. It’s at the core—or the search for the truth—is at the core of some of our greatest human achievements. It can animate and inspire us to do, learn and create great things. But I think in our messy human hearts, we also know that the truth is something of a fickle mistress and that the beauty of the truth is often in the struggle. It’s the reason that we have so many sublime chronicles of the human experience, because we have so many different truths to be explored…. For many of us, truth is what we make when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. Each of us has our own truth and it’s probably a good one.

This excerpt comes from a a TED talk she gave in 2021, a talk in which Maher addresses the collapse of trust in public institutions due in the face of rising misinformation and disconnect between those institutions' agendas and the public’s needs. Her talk addresses how Wikipedia’s approach to information trends towards a collaborative model of consensus perspective and seeks to avoid an authoritative and prescriptive determination of fact. Wikipedia’s model has many flaws, but I would struggle to rank its epistemological approach near the top. Wikipedia seeks to converge towards a model where the information documented is collectively deemed to be as true as possible, while leaving the door open for future challenges for these truths to be added, recontextualized, or refocused. While Wikipedia has a long way to go to be more open to various perspectives of truth, the embrace of an idea that truth is inherently incomplete, inherently dynamic, and inherently collaborative is a powerful one that pierces the breastplate of fascist thought. In other words, per the Wikipedian view truth is a process, whereas to the authoritarian truth is a status.

Maher’s comments and Wikipedia’s philosophy challenge the authoritative and fascistic model of truthtelling preferred by Musk and his army of right wing and “Libertarian” followers. To an authoritarian, truth is a matter of prescription. Truth descends from authority and its perspective on objectivity. Authoritarians demand that there is a single truth and that there is a single source of truth: themselves. Maher’s insightful commentary on truth challenges this idea, as do her later comments that Wikipedia’s model encourages shared power, that Wikipedia editors have to “let go of power… you have to trust in their ability to manage the areas of their own expertise and interests.” For the American right, this represents a grave threat to their worldview, a worldview dependent on the manufacture of controversy, enemies, and the convenient truths necessary to sustain their authority.

In his book A Brief History of Fascist Lies, the Argentinian historian Federico Finchelstein writes in the chapter titled “Truth and Power”:

In fascism, belief was intimately linked to an act of faith in the conductor. Fascism presented its leaders as living myths. While in Germany the Führerprinzip featured Hitler as the ultimate source of truth and authority, in Argentina, Spain, and beyond, fascists identified the politics of their leaders with a transcendental mythical truth. The truth of fascism connected the reality of the movement and its leaders with a mythical past of heroism, violence, and subordination. In fascist ideology, the leaders personified a direct link with this epochal continuum, establishing a unitary front with the people and the nation. In turn, the dictator was the definitive source of popular sovereignty, responsible only to himself…. Fascists were obsessed with the infallibility of their leaders because, for them, the lack of error reflected the core divine truths of the mythical ideology that had incarnated in the heroic conductor of men.

In this sense, it’s perhaps more sensible to think of the deportment of the American Right in recent years less as a culture war and more as an epistemological one. Right wing mouthpieces aren’t simply trying to ensure that American values remain favorable to the cisgender, heterosexual white man, they are also trying to command the authority to define. They are here to define what a woman is, how many genders there are, whether the January 6 rioters were terrorists or patriots, and the meaning of due process. This is why the American right cannot be engaged as an intellectual exercise. They are not opponents in a game of chess playing by accepted rules. They are seeking to define the colors of the squares and the rules by which the pieces move. While you’re playing the board, they’re playing the rulebook.

The course of my professional duties has led me to deep introspection the last few years on what it means for something to be true. As a data consultant, one of the most challenging problems that my clients wish to address is how to reduce massive, decade-spanning enterprise datasets to become a “single source of truth.” I caution them against this idea, warning that the context that reflects a truth may be useful for one person but useless or harmful to another. In my definition of data, a datum is nothing more than a measure of a universal process taken at a point in time. Permit me to illustrate with an example.

Suppose you walk onto the jobsite of a house under construction and you take out your tape measure and measure a stud in a wall being built. The dimensions of that board represent your data for the state of that board at that point in time, which is the output of a process. Specifically, the length of the board emerges from the handiwork of the carpenter. But it also reflects something about the decisions of the architect and the building standards at that time. The data you collect reflects a fragment of several truths pertinent to several perspectives, even if we uncontroversially accept the quality and correctness of the measurement you took.

Suppose you come back thirty years later and tear out the wall and measure the stud again. Its dimensions may have changed—from wear, from expansion and contraction—and these new measurements reflect the output of a new process and a new truth. Suppose in three decades time you find the board to be two inches shorter than expected. Is this anomaly a reflection of a failed understanding of the contemporary building codes? Perhaps the carpenter cut it wrong. Perhaps the builders received a variance, the record of which has long since been lost in the county archives. Not only has the truth of the board’s dimensionality changed, but so too has the truth of the antecedent processes that caused the board to be that length. Or in other words, the more narrowly we try to define truth, the more we necessarily limit the domain to which that truth applies. This example works well in the real world, of course: a standard North American dimensional 2x4 actually measures 1½" by 3½". Every weekend warrior casually engages with the idea of multiple truths in every Home Depot trip they make.

When I’m consulting my clients, I typically encourage them to spend less time and money attempting to build the canonical system to authoritively contain all truths for the future to come, and more time and money trying to better understand the contexts and optimize processes that create them. I genuinely believe that the more comfortable we get with embracing uncertainty, duality and incompleteness, and the more resistant we become to the urges for stasis and declarative authority, the more resilient we become, rejecting the need for faith in heroic leaders of men to guide us out of the rhetorical morass of our complex, contradictory reality. I am still talking about data platforms, but I am also talking about politics and history and my own relationship with my own past perceptions and beliefs.

I got rid of my aviation collection a few years ago because I had come to recognize that the American mythology I had been brought up with greatly overstated and valorized my country’s role in World War II. I became aware of a different truth as I viewed the same history through a more seasoned lens. Nevertheless, I’m still the same kid who looks up every time I hear an airplane overhead, and I was thrilled to find the story of Captain Zeamer and his B-17 recounted in the opening chapter of Caidin’s 600-page tome.

Equipped with the details of the mission, I went back to Wikipedia, eager to contribute the story of Zeamer’s air-to-air kill against a Zero to the Operational History section of the B-17 page. It’s a remarkable story, a salvaged B-17 engaging in a turning dogfight against a much more nimble and ably piloted Japanese Zero and, with an jury rigged machine gun shooting through the nose of the plane, without proper gunsights or training, scoring a kill.

What I found when I did further research is that the story is told, not quite as Caidin tells it, on a number of other pages across the internet. The story of Zeamer’s acts are recounted in his Medal of Honor citation, on the Air Force’s history page, on his Wikipedia page, and again on the page dedicated to his aircraft, Old 666. It’s only on this last page that I found a single sentence that opens the story to multiple versions of truth: Japanese records also document Zeamer’s mission, but do not record any losses among their squadron, certainly not five losses, and not one to a gun mounted on the floor of the flight deck of a wounded four-engine bomber.

The over-claiming of air-to-air kills was common throughout the war among parties on all sides. It’s entirely possible that Zeamer’s crew mistook damaged fighters for destroyed ones or miscounted their totals in the heat of battle. It’s possible that they exaggerated their deeds and that the story didn’t happen as told. It’s also possible that the Japanese commander, shamed and embarassed at the inability to down a single undefended bomber with an entire squadron of crack pilots flying top-of-the-line fighters, simply failed to record the mission’s losses. Under authoritarian systems, accurate recapitulation of combat missions only works to the author’s benefit if the reported truth serves the authority’s goals; the necessity of domestic wartime propaganda emerges exactly from the inability or unwillingness to engage with complexities of the truths on the front. Much like the measurement of a 2x4, these reports are data, measurements of a process at points in time: processes such as the combat mission, but also processes like the pressures put on the soldiers and officers by the ministries and departments that oversee them and the populations that demand to hear that their side is winning. The complete truth of the mission is probably lost to time. What’s certain is that Jay Zeamer was badly injured during the mission, that he needed months of rehabilitation to recover from his wounds and walked with a cane for the rest of his life, until his death in 2007. It’s certain that he completed this difficult mission heroically regardless of whether or not he accomplished an unlikely air-to-air kill with a fixed machine gun in the nose of his bomber.

I don’t speak Japanese and I can’t verify those records myself. As Maher puts it, I have to trust in more capable Wikipedians' “ability to manage the areas of their own expertise and interests.” In the many stories of Zeamer’s feat, it’s only on Wikipedia that it was possible for me to find a potentially contradictory narrative. Something happened in the skies over the Solomon Islands that June afternoon, and we may never be able to ascertain the exact details. But as long as we can accept that there are multiple truths to the story, and as long as we resist the belief that we must authoritatively declare only one of them to be the real truth, then we’re much more likely to be able to converge over time to the most complete representation of this story.

The more willing we are to realize that objectivity can only be reflected from the aggregate of all observations, the stronger our immunities will be to what Finchelstein calls “the imbrication of violence, myth, and the fantasy of an eternal truth.” To defeat fascism we will have to battle fascists on the fields of epistemology and reject each of their claims to authority over truth.

Though the initial wave of attacks was months ago, I have seen renewed interest in this form of scaled harassment in the form of well-received posts floating around LinkedIn as recently as last week. This is no surprise, as Elon Musk has renewed his assault on Wikipedia recently. ↩︎
I had the honor to meet and chat with Katherine over drinks at Mozfest in 2017, and found her to be both sharp and empathetic. The event took place just weeks after Unite the Right and I was still reeling in shock and trauma. I didn’t know her well then and don’t know her well now, but the brief conversation we had is one of the few positive memories I retained from the latter third of what was a very awful year. ↩︎