Post 659 - October 6, 2024

Lying used to be a sin.

Judaism and Christianity put it at number nine on their list of the top ten things nobody should do. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Moses brought the said list down from the mount after reportedly getting it from God, himself.

The Quran says that those who forge a lie against Allah shall not prosper. Lying is an evil sin, and all sins lead to the Fire. That said, Muslims believe that it is okay to lie to an infidel. It is part of what is called Kitman. In Islam, Kitman is used to protect its followers from persecution. You can lie about being a follower of Islam if it’s going to get you in trouble.

Hindus take a slightly different approach to the whole concept. Lying isn’t in itself, sinful, but the intentions behind one’s choice to lie might be. Lying for personal gain at the expense of another is definitely not good. Lying to protect someone’s feelings might be.

The 4^th of the five precepts for living an ethical life in Buddhism is to refrain from false and harmful speech,

To put it simply, whatever else we might disagree about, we seem to be in global agreement about this: don’t lie.

In 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency of the United States because he got caught in a lie. He had denied having any involvement in what we now know as the Watergate break-in. Two Washington Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, after months of painstaking digging, finally uncovered the truth. Nixon had lied. He had authorized the spying on his opponents.

The closest Nixon ever got to admitting that he lied in his resignation speech was to say, “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.”

That, of course, was also a lie. He did not believe his actions to be in the best interests of his country, he believed them to be in the best interests of Richard M. Nixon.

Fifty years later, looking at his actions through a contemporary lens, compared to what we get now, they almost look honorable. However much he may have fumfered around accepting responsibility for his lies, he at least seemed to know that he’d been caught. He had enough of a moral compass to do the right thing and resign.

That would never happen today. As support for the GOP’s positions has slowly eroded, instead of altering their policies, they have, instead, become expert liars.

I can hear it now: “Both sides lie.” I think that’s a false equivalency. Maybe you could even call it a lie.

We are all savvy enough to know that no politician ever tells the truth all the time. None of us will ever know what’s really going on in the upper reaches of our government no matter which party is in office. We expect transparency from our public servants. They work for us, not the other way around. That said, sometimes it’s better that we don’t know everything.

I know from having been on boards and committees and having worked in management that there are things that you keep to yourself. Sometimes to protect people and sometimes, yes, to manipulate everyone into doing what you want. Sometimes it’s honorable and sometimes… not so much.

The Republicans, since the days of Richard Nixon, started using lying as their default starting point. At no time was this more apparent than on January 22, 2017, when Kellyanne Conway, a U.S. Counselor to the former president first used the phrase, “alternative facts” to defend a lie White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told about the crowd size at 45’s inauguration.

The GOP used this phrase to rebrand lying. They created a workaround to the Ten Commandments their followers supposedly believe in so that they can commit a sin and not be punished by eternal damnation for it. Clearly, they must think their God is an idiot.

Alternative facts became used so much as a catchphrase that we all stopped being shocked by it. The relentless onslaught of lies rebranded as alternative facts normalized them. Career-ending statements now rarely last beyond a news cycle.

Secretary Clinton endured thirty years of incessant Republican lying. They accused her of everything they could think of. They never let up. One lie after another spewed forth out of the machine. Some of them were utterly ridiculous. She was accused of running a pedophilic sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizzeria. As it turns out, the pedophile the Republicans were trying to divert attention from was Jeffrey Epstein who, among people from both sides of the aisle, numbered the former president as a close friend.

Even people who had supported Secretary Clinton in the past began to question her as the sheer number of lies that had been heaped upon her steadily increased. When they stopped believing her, it was always for the same reason. “I don’t know what she did, but she must have done something.”

Hannah Arendt was a political theorist who died a year after Nixon resigned. I don’t mean to imply that Nixon had anything to do with her demise. I’m just putting her work into a historical context.

There’s a quote of hers that has been circulating throughout social media about lying which, I’m sorry to say, is a lie in and of itself. The spirit of what she said is inherent in the fake quote, but somebody has altered it to make it either easier to understand or maybe just shorter.

The real quote is this: "The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

That’s where we are. Our ability to discern between the truth and a lie has been worn away almost to the point that we can’t do it anymore.

Karen McDougal alleged that she had had a ten-month affair with the former president when she was a witness in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial. She was paid a large sum of money for the rights to her story by the National Enquirer. The tabloid never intended to publish it, instead, they wanted to bury it. Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News show, repeatedly lied about the facts surrounding the case.

In their defense, Fox News’s lawyers said that nobody would ever think that anything Tucker Carlson said was a fact. They said that McDougal’s claim that “a reasonable viewer of ordinary intelligence listening or watching the show… would conclude that (McDougal) is a criminal who extorted T---- for money” and that the “statements about (McDougal) were fact. Context makes plain that no reasonable viewer would do that.”

This defense swayed the judge who agreed with them. Nobody watching Tucker Carlson would ever assume he was telling the truth. And yet, millions of people did and somewhat fewer of them still do.

None of our news outlets are fully independent anymore. They are controlled by corporate financial entities who have a vested interest in particular political outcomes. I know enough to dismiss anything published in a rag like Breitbart, but how do we judge content in the supposedly reliable national press?

I have people who should know better sending me articles all the time from Breitbart to support their opinions. Breitbart is not even pretending to be factual. No reasonable reader should believe them and yet plenty do.

The best I can do in return is to try and find a consensus between all of the more reputable agencies. There is ample evidence that there has been an outpouring of support for the Asheville area after the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene. The far-right is lying about it.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said that “they” can now control the weather. Who is this “they” she is talking about?

Say for argument’s sake that somebody has, indeed, figured out how to control the weather. They decide to send a hurricane into Asheville, North Carolina. If that’s what happened then it would be safe to assume that “they” were a Republican. Asheville is a little extremely blue dot in a vast sea of red. It is a liberal, artistic community in an otherwise predominantly conservative area of the state. Why would a Democrat try to destroy it?

I suppose we should remember that MTG is also the same nutjob who railed against Jewish space lasers.

Hannah Arendt wrote during and after World War II when the rise of Nationalism in Germany was still very fresh on everybody’s minds. The potential for that same thing happening here in the United States was always a possibility, but we hadn’t yet arrived at the point where we find ourselves now.

So many writers and filmmakers have fantasized about being able to go back in time to stop Hitler and change the course of history. We, Americans, don’t have to time travel to do that. We can stop this from happening again in just a short month from now.

During the 2016 election, the actress Susan Sarandon voted for Bernie Sanders knowing that the votes he splintered off from the Clinton campaign would only help the Republicans. She believed that if the former president was elected it would hasten the “revolution.”

If the former president is re-elected, then I don’t see any way out of what will ensue other than a revolution. The Supreme Court which should be a buffer against him won’t stop him. They’re on his side.

Should the Democrats win, though, how do they fix this? We are already so far down the path that Ms. Arendt described that what can we possibly do to stop it?

Whatever happens, I am ready. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prepared, I’m just ready. We’ve been creeping up the slope of this roller coaster ride and the anticipation is becoming harder and harder to live with. Just drop us off the other side for heaven’s sake and get the suspense over with.

I’m not listening to the polling. I’m trying to avoid the “neck-and-neck” reporting. Common sense tells me that the Democrats are going to win. So many around me, though, seem to have left common sense back in the locker at the beginning of the ride.

Breathe.

I am looking out the window at a spectacular fall day in New York City. These days are one of the reasons why we live in this city. The air is crisp and clean, and the sky is a perfect blue expanse overhead. The trees are just beginning to think about dropping their leaves but haven’t gotten themselves around to doing it yet.

Michael is cooking breakfast in the kitchen. The cat is curled up next to me on the couch.

It’s good to be home.