Duke case hard to unclutter

We want it to be neat. We want it tied up in a tidy package that tells the world, yes, this is what happened, and this is what it means.

But life is seldom that cooperative. Look no farther than the lacrosse/rape morass at Duke University.

Wouldn't it be nice if what happened there were readily obvious, if we knew who did what when, and why?

But we don't, so we take the facts as they trickle out and try to analyze them. We try to separate good guys from bad.

We journalists are as guilty as anyone. That's because it's our job to report on what is going on and to try to make sense of it for our readers.

So as the story has evolved, we have all, readers and writers alike, searched for the appropriate boxes to put it in.

We've searched for good guys and, finding few, have trained our sights on a succession of bad guys, many of whom turn out to be not so bad after all.

For a while it looked like District Attorney Mike Nifong might be the sacrificial lamb in the case. The grandstanding media hog who inexplicably complained about losing his anonymity -- while running for public office. Then he won a tough election, proving the adage: Any publicity is good publicity -- as long as they spell your name right.

Then, briefly, the focus was on drinking on campus. In some ways it was a relief: an old problem we know and understand.

That is so much easier to process than graduates of all-boys Catholic high schools hiring strippers, writing sadistic e-mail (as a joke?) and being accused of rape.

It's so much easier to sympathize with the scrappy college student and single mother than the exotic dancer who filed rape charges against three other men 10 years ago. In the end, we want the lacrosse players to be saints -- or monsters.

We want the woman to be honorable, even though she worked for an escort service -- or a hustler. We want her to have told a consistent story -- even though some victims of rape do and say things that do not help their cases.

We want Duke officials to be part of a conspiracy to cover up bad actions by athletes -- or responsive leaders willing to make tough choices under extreme pressure.

We want the Durham police to have learned something since the days that Mike Peterson skewered them repeatedly for mishandling cases.

We want this rape never to have occurred. And yet we want this woman not to have lied. Already, as one female lawyer put it, the case has wiped out decades of progress, as this "alleged victim" is called upon to answer for her past and her profession.

We want black and white in a universe of gray. And by this time, we have learned that the more information emerges, the murkier the case becomes.

I dread the way all the murkiness will be manipulated and muddied further in the months ahead as this case drags out.

Of course, the prosecutors and high-priced defense lawyers (not to mention the public relations specialist hired by the lacrosse players' families) will do their best to paint the bad guys and good guys in bold strokes.

If only real life were so neat.

It's not.