One morning last month, an 11-year-old boy who lives in our small town in SouthernItalyasked me a question I never expected to hear from an 11-year-old boy who lives in a small town in Southern Italy.
He asked me, “Have you read theEpstein files?”
We were in a classroom at the local middle school, Istituto Comprensivo Abele de Blasio. I’d volunteered, as an American expat now a full-time resident in Italy, a few hours a month as a teacher there. My curriculum was designed to encourage my 60 students to discover their personal family histories through interviews with their parents and then report their findings.
The children took the opportunity to ask me all kinds of questions. “Why did you move to Italy?” “Did you know Michael Jackson?” “What do you think of Donald Trump?” “How far do you think theNew York Knickscan go in the NBA playoffs?”
But the question about the ubiquitous Epstein files left me flabbergasted. The boy posed the query with a perfectly straight face, no mischief in evidence, genuinely curious. At no point did I suspect he was pretending to conduct a congressional cross-examination.
My answer about whether I had actually eyeballed the evidence compiled to date — all 3.5 million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos — came easily. “No, I have not,” I said bluntly.
“I have no intention of reading the Epstein files either,” I went on. “I already know enough about the Epstein files to hold me for life. There’s a lot of other stuff I would much rather be reading.”
But I took care to avoid sounding unduly haughty and dismissive. So, with a kidding smile, I asked my student, “Have you read the Epstein files?” He nodded his head with an emphatic no.
“Do you intend to read the Epstein files?” I asked. Again, he nodded no, only now more emphatically.
“OK, but then why have you asked me this question in the first place?”
“Because it’sin the news,” he said. “It’s all over the place.”
Well, he certainly got that right. The argument could be made that the mainstream news media has overplayed its hand, hyperventilating obsessively over the Epstein files to a degree perilously close to pathological. And yes, I’m presuming to make that argument here.
Italian media, in particular, have zeroed in, albeit understandably so, on the Italian connections at play here. The name of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, appears in the Epstein files nearly 100 times. But the Epstein-Salvini association exists only because of Salvini’s email exchanges about international politics with political strategist Steve Bannon.
Even so, apropos the question my student asked me, I have to ask some questions of my own here. Have we already learned 99% of everything we really need and care to know about the Epstein files? Does anyone still suspect that the Epstein files are the holy grail that justify everyconspiracy theoryever hatched, and that every disclosure, every bold-face name unearthed, qualifies as a revelation that should automatically lead to accusation, indictment, conviction, and incarceration?
Just asking here is all.
