Do we believe what we want to believe, or what we can prove to be true?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 2, 2024 – Candidate Barack Obama did not invent hope, but he rode that ambiguous noun/verb all the way to the White House, where he made the unpardonable mistake of belittling a reality TV character in public, thus inviting a monstrous response.
Forever after, the literate Obama merits library shelf space alongside Mary Shelley and Thomas Hobbes, whose own creations are Frankenstein and Leviathan. Or did our own Herman Melville paint a more accurate portrait? Has the recent election made us all passengers on the Pequod, captives to the resentments of her pathetic, crippled captain?
The re-inauguration of Trump is sufficient proof that hope speaks louder than fact in America. In the home of the brave and the land of the free, a daylight nightmare is the all-consuming reality, as seen on TV, because people believe what they are told rather than what they know, or can prove, to be true.
President Obama himself spoke of “truthiness,” and pundits warn that a “post-truth” era has begun. But truth, like liberty and justice, is indivisible. In the nightmare of reality TV, half-truth swallows whole truth. As a 19th century American metaphysician put it, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has her shoes on.”
Few things worried the architects of America’s constitution more than political partisanship. When asked about it immediately after America’s birth, doula Ben Franklin announced that a republic had been born, then was quick to warn “…if you can keep it.”
We have lost it
In a republic, ALL power is vested in the people. In a democracy, power flows into the hands of the party that gets the most votes. Has nobody thought how hideous it is that our domestic and foreign armed forces will again be sworn to obey whatever orders a serial felon, fraud, and rapist issues?
What happens at West Point, where all cadets pledge an oath to not lie, cheat, steal or to tolerate those who do lie, cheat, and steal? I tried to ask alumnus and Trump trumpet Mike Pompeo that question, but he wouldn’t answer my call!
Would Trump have ordered policemen Daniel Panteleo and Derek Chauvin not to execute Eric Garner and George Floyd? When he pardoned sailors for war crimes in 2019, he condemned all American servicemen to savage treatment by the enemy after, or instead of, being captured.
He condemned John McCain for having been captured by the Vietnamese, after bragging about dodging the Vietnam war and calling everybody who served there “suckers.”
The hum of a prosperous consumer economy has hypnotized the American people. We have re-empowered someone who has never done the right thing. He has always done the most selfish thing. Roy Cohn, who called Trump his only friend, was abandoned by him, when dying of Aids in the 1980s, after having taught him how to become the Hitler his father wanted him to become.
It’s a cruel irony that Reagan partisans mishandled AIDs in the same deadly fashion as Trump partisans mishandled Covid. Anybody who hopes for better treatment from POTUS 47 is under a spell. Whatever the wake-up cue turns out to be, it is unlikely to be proclaimed, in advance, on TV.