lies

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Lies, Damned Lies and Alternative Facts

One of the first headlines to announce the downfall of a kingdom was

MENE, MENE, TEKEL and PARSIN

This is the infamous “handwriting on the wall” found in the Book of Daniel 5:24-28. The words refer to monetary units in Aramaic, used to represent God’s judgment of the kingdom as follows:

Mene, mene – God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end

Tekel – You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting

Peres – Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

 The metaphor of the “scales” suggests an unscrupulous merchant who would falsify the weight of his goods to cheat the buyer. The scales would use weights in one pan to equal the weight of the product in the other.  If the weights were falsely labeled, the product would actually weigh less than advertised, and the buyer would be cheated.  The author of the Book of Daniel sets this announcement at a banquet, where King Nebuchadnezzar and his court were celebrating using the holy vessels of the Jewish Temple, taken as spoils in the capture of Judah. Desecration will not go unchallenged, the story suggests.

Donald Trump is a deal-maker who expects to take advantage of false weights in the balance. Without his tax returns there is not much to prove his monetary manipulations, but his employment of alternative facts and outright lies shows that he has talent for deception and manipulation. This, more than his inhumane policies and contempt for the weak, will eventually end with his kingdom severed from him. This is no prophecy, but based on the simple faith that false balances have ultimate consequences.

Presidents do  lie, but there are lies, damned lies and alternative facts. President Clinton lied about his illicit relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He did it for the same reason we all lie: to avoid humiliation and consequences. He did it for the same reason as Adam and Eve: the archetypal lie to escape punishment. As the story of the Fall implies, we are all party to it.

We are less likely to be involved in damned lies. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon lied consistently about the carnage of the War in Vietnam.  The Pentagon Papers revealed systematic lying to the public in order to wage battle against Communism and later, when conscience told them to retreat, to protect their legacy against being the first American President to lose a war. These are damned lies, disguised as policy and masked by what government calls “classification” of information.  It may have an institutional justification, but “damned lies” nonetheless.

Then there are “alternative facts,” lies told to gain position and distort reality. These are the most cynical lies, because they are nothing but the opening gambit of a deal.  When Donald Trump claimed he had lost the popular vote from millions of illegal immigrants voting, he had no actual facts. He knew the Pew Study was nothing more than a discovery of outdated voting lists, at worst poor record-keeping. He knew there was not a trace of mass voter fraud in all the investigations of all the elections in America.

But President Trump wanted to curb voter access to the polls, to keep the poor and minorities from voting against his interests, and to justify his failure to win the popular vote.  It was unconscionable for a populist President to lose the popular vote, so he made the unsupported claim that voter fraud had cost him the vote.

Alternative facts are the lowest form of lying, because they are deliberate, they are strategic, and they are gratuitous.  The investigation of voter fraud will sow just enough doubt to keep citizens suspicious of future fraud.  And the President may walk back his claims of millions of fraudulent votes to a few thousand or claim he never made such a bold declaration in order to narrow the distance between alternative facts and known facts.  Because these lies are merely a negotiation with the truth.

In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: The first casualty when war comes is truth. No doubt this will be the legacy of the Trump administration. This deal-making with the truth very much simulates the false weights in the balance pan, the ones that make the product appear more substantial and more valuable than it really is.  It is deliberate, strategic and gratuitous. It is more than self-protective, more than expedient policy, it is more than a defensive posture. It is a diabolical scheme.

Like his Babylonian predecessor, President Trump will have his kingdom ripped from him, not for his contempt for global warming or his campaign against refugees, but for reckless manipulation of truth. The lies and the damned lies are part of the business of politics, but the frontal assault on vulnerable truth will eventually disqualify him, and his kingdom will be given to an administration that admits a little more fear of God.

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Liar! Liar!

I really like UN representative Samantha Power for standing before the Security Council and calling Vladimir Putin what he is. A Liar! Not a revisionist or an apologist or a publicist. A Liar! In her words,

Russia has come before this Council to say everything but the truth. It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied. So we have learned to measure Russia by its actions not by its words. In the last 48 hours Russia’s actions have spoken volumes. (New York Times, August 29, 2014)

Having grown up in the throes of the Cold War, when Soviet leaders were lying only when their mouths were moving, I have a little pent-up resentment about falsehoods going unchallenged from our side of the Atlantic. The UN was the site of some whoppers, and the home country was not direct in challenging what was plainly contradicted by facts.  We questioned, we disagreed and we objected, but the “L-word” was used sparingly. You don’t call someone a liar without conviction.

Because “a lie is a false statement with deliberate intent to deceive” (Random House). A lie is not inadvertent or erroneous. It is calculated. So you aren’t equivocating when you call someone “a liar.”  At the same time you are clearing the air of disinformation by flatly contradicting what lingers as a manipulation of the truth. So the accusation of “liar” is needed to set the record straight.

Unlike many other names you can call somebody, this one is productive, because it changes how we see events. There is no residual question of whether Russia is really “peacekeeping” when it sends armored personnel carriers into the Ukraine.  And no question about whether there are good intentions behind providing sophisticated weapons to the separatists in the east. It is military aggression pushing toward war.

So if “Liar!” is accusatory, so be it. Better that than to allow the lie to stand and undermine the facts. No better place to go on record than the United Nations for all the world to hear. If you buy this fellow’s whoppers, then I have some PAC’s on our native soil you can support.

Well done, Ambassador Powers! I wish you had been here in the 1960’s. In those days we called it “propaganda.”