An Ominous Eviction
November 2, 2009
It's possible for political divisions in a country to become so vehement that truth becomes irrelevant. I'm afraid we're close to that condition in the United States right now.
I live close enough to New York to get the ads for candidates in the 23rd District on my TV every day. They are all absurd. I'm used to seeing absurd Republican ads. But the Democratic commercials in this district have been absurd also. There are no attempts whatsoever to portray opponents accurately.
You can shrug your shoulders and say that's just the way it is now. But that doesn't address the problem caused by the banishment of truth.
Unless the truth can filter through, somehow, to a major portion of the electorate, public policy is bound to become increasingly divorced from reality. It's hard enough in the kind of world we occupy today to know what reality is. Were we trying as honestly as we can to know it, we would still be confused. But we're not trying. Virtually all political attention is concentrated on denouncing the opponent. The truth be damned if it gets in the way of bringing down the opposition.
The problem is exacerbated by the behavior of many politicians which does deserve to be denounced. Serious commentators are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they hold back from saying honestly what certain politicians are, the public gets skewed perception of the political contest. This is the tactic of most major news organizations, and in particular of CBS, NBC, and ABC. The consequence is a weak and adulterated portrait of the political scene. On the other hand, if commentators try to describe partisans accurately they are, themselves, denounced as partisans and contribute to the atmosphere in which the truth is drowned out by name-calling.
It's not easy to know what to do. I suppose you could throw yourself into the fray, on whatever side you want to support, and become a liar like everyone else. That seems to give some people a feeling of virtue. Yet it confronts you with the not altogether easy task of pushing the truth completely out of your mind. Do that long enough and you'll forget what the truth is.
You could retreat completely, try to find a sanctuary, and tell yourself that after a while the fever will burn itself out. It probably would burn itself out at sometime but not before there were many casualties and hardships which are likely to last for decades.
You can pick a single cause which you care about intensely, and stop saying anything about anything else. If I were to do that, I would concentrate on ridding my nation of the blight of capital punishment. But I couldn't tell myself that getting rid of state killing would improve the medical system, or help the population become better educated, or provide a decent income for all the people, or reduce the influence of the militarists (come to think of it, there might be a small effect on the latter but it wouldn't be sufficient to shove them into disgrace).
In the normal course of column-writing, after listing a series of approaches which are unsatisfying, one is supposed to come up with a tactic which is. My difficulty, right now, is I don't have one.
If you listen carefully to the news, you'll hear a refrain rising which holds that the United States, through a kind of stupid self-adulation, has piled up so many problems for itself that they can't be solved. The current conditions are driving people into insane anger and complete rejection of truth. Obama is a bright, energetic man but nobody, however bright and energetic he might be, can solve insoluble problems.
I know: even to think such a thing is intensely un-American. Yet it is being thought. I think it myself sometimes.
If that's the case, what will happen? Will we disappear? No, we'll just keep on living with problems we can't solve and, as a result, life will get more nasty and more brutish.
It's not a happy outcome. But it could be the one our rejection of truth will deliver to us.
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