Francine Prose - Truth is evaporating before our eyes
Given how little
content the 2016 presidential debates contained, how rarely specific policies
or programs were outlined or even mentioned, it often seemed that the only
thing left for journalists – and ordinary citizens – to do was tally the number
of lies each candidate told.
By some counts,
Donald Trump told a lie every few minutes; Hillary Clinton’s distortions appear
to have been fewer and less blatant. And when the bigger liar won the election,
one conclusion to be drawn was that, for millions of Americans, honesty was not
nearly so important as we might have wished or assumed. If we factor in the
popular assumption that all politicians lie, perhaps all that mattered was what
they lied about.
Who cared if Trump
denied sexually harassing women when he was so boldly telling the truth about
the fear, rage, racism, xenophobia and misogyny that many of his supporters
felt but had hesitated to voice? More recently, Newt
Gingrich, among others, has been informing us that facts and statistics no
longer count so much as feelings, suspicions, prejudices and anecdotal
evidence. The fact that violent crime is down, Gingrich explained on
CNN, is of less import than the fact that “people feel more threatened.
Liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right but
are not how human beings are. As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people
feel, and I’ll let you go with theoreticians.”
As a consequence, we
have begun to hear that we are living in a post-truth
era, a period in which (to paraphrase Gingrich) those in power get to
decide what is true and what isn’t. When, just before the election, a friend in
upstate New York confronted a neighbor with evidence of Donald Trump’s
misdeeds, her neighbor’s only response was: “That depends on where you get your
facts.”
It’s dismaying to see
how accurately George Orwell’s 1943 essay on the Spanish civil war predicted
the present moment. Orwell feared “that the concept of objective truth is
fading out of the world … I am willing to believe that history is for the most
part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the
abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully
written. In the past people deliberately lied, or unconsciously colored what
they wrote, or they struggled after the truth … but in each case they believed
that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.
“Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that
such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists … The implied objective of this line of
thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique,
controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of
such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he
says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.”
If we look for the reasons
why Orwell’s dire presentiments threaten to become our everyday reality, we
might consider the idea that Trump and his cohorts are reaping the benefits of
the gradual (and, I would suggest, intentional) undermining and dismantling of
our increasingly overcrowded and understaffed public education system. In school, we learn to
distinguish truth from speculation, to value facts, to assess evidence, to
evaluate information, to identify propaganda – to think. If what worried Orwell
was widespread skepticism about our chances of writing history with any
resemblance to the truth, how would he feel about a populace and a leadership
that no longer values history at all, that has no respect for science, that
believes the only subject worth pursuing is the how-to of uncontrolled
capitalism?
Meanwhile many of us
keep looking for some gleam of … something to brighten the insomniac nights.
Perhaps the ascendancy of liars and truth-deniers will inspire Americans to
become more vigilant, more alert to the malignantly proliferating lies of euphemistic
language, lies of omission, lies that normalize the rise of a president
with no
Perhaps this vigilance
will make us braver about speaking up, speaking out. Or perhaps Trump’s
supporters will realize that they have been lied to, that the “populism” they
were promised has turned out to be a shill for a government run by
billionaires.
Who would have
imagined that we would find such reassurance in the maxim most commonly (if, as
some say, erroneously) attributed to that great American showman PT Barnum:
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of
the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Or anyway, so we can
hope.
