Whoppers
I grew up in a world where facts mattered. It was the basis of the Vietnam War protests: the “facts” that the US Government lied about to us. Folks risked their freedom and their lives to get the facts out, folks like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. The Papers were the factual history, written for the Secretary of Defense, and demonstrated the pattern of lies and misinformation about the conflict given to the American people by the military and the President over three administrations.
Facts mattered. So it is with dismay that I watch our current President tell lie after lie. I don’t believe people are stupid: so how can they accept the demonstrable lies they are given? Cognitive dissonance, willful self-deception, auto-suggestion, confabulation, self-indoctrination, double-think, delusional, the big lie: all try to describe what is going on in our political world today. Most of these terms contain two elements, the internal realization that there is a lie, and the determination to make that lie truth anyway.
Let’s look at this week in American politics. We have been told that the “wall” is already being built, when it demonstrably is not. The cry has been made that there is a “crisis on the border,” when statistically fewer illegal crossings are occurring now than in the past several years. And the biggest lie of all: we have been told that a fence is a wall, or that a barrier is a wall, even though we ALL know what a wall looks like. The scariest part of that is that now the media (and not just FOX; CNN and MSNBC as well) have reporters standing beside demonstrable fences that you can see through; gesturing to it and calling it a “wall.”
And outside of the “non-crisis” on the border that is throwing our government into a desperate mess, we have been told that the Democrats want to pass a “Green New Deal” that will, and I quote Republican speeches given on the floor of the US Senate: ban cattle farming, end products from ice cream to milk to cheeseburgers; stop air travel, and take away our cars. None of those “facts” are real; the Green New Deal looks at various ways we create pollution, including cattle farts and air travel, and tries to balance the pollution we have to make, with pollution we can choose to limit; such as the coal fired power plants President Trump ordered the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep open (the TVA refused.)
Perhaps the biggest “lie” of the week though was reserved for the alterations in abortion laws that New York made and Virginia is contemplating. Those laws codified what the US Supreme Court has already accepted, that abortions before twenty weeks of gestation are “on demand,” and that those after can be made for the health of the mother or the viability of the fetus with the recommendation of health professionals. Several states are looking at putting those factors into law, in anticipation of the Federalist majority of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade and returning abortion controls to the states.
But instead of noting the current state of law, opponents to those laws are screaming that babies could be murdered after birth, as if this is new “pro-murder” legislation. It’s nothing particularly new for the “pro-birth” movement, but if you view Facebook with the right set of “friends” you can see the panic, claiming that live babies will be ripped from the womb.
And we haven’t even mentioned the ongoing self-delusion of some about vaccinating children, or climate change.
As I was growing up, the ultimate authority for any language question for my University of London (UK) educated mother was the Oxford Dictionary. If it was there – it was right – even when I failed spelling tests with “theatre” and “favour.” And it’s there:
“Post-Truth” Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
We live in a “post-truth” era, at least for the moment. Politicians, and friends, can tell “whoppers” and demand they be accepted as fact. Maybe that’s a good thing, if the “Green New Deal” passes, we won’t be able to eat “whoppers” so at least we can still tell them.
