Truth? You Can’t Handle the Truth!
I like to think I am a student of history, a person who would rather not repeat the past because I was too lazy to remember it. You know, unless it’s to make America great again. What I’m learning this past year is that it is important, very important, to lie. Not just lie, but lie bigly. Bigly beautiful lies. The wilder the whopper the better. Folks love it, they really do. Don’t ask me why, I’m a student of history, not the professor.
Maybe it’s just this era we live in, the one where folks are feeling a little insecure about their jobs and their future. Anxious about where the country is headed. Or the world. We want to bury our heads in some nice warm sandbox and build a tall wall to keep the rapists and killers on the other side of our borders. And I’m not just talking about those Canucks, believe me. Trust me on this, we got grievances. Lots of them and we want somebody to smack down the people and smite the countries who grieve us the most. Take that 9-11 attack. Okay, we didn’t really know who was behind it, but like some of the boys down at the Pilot Lounge said the following day, Somebody’s got to pay for this and they didn’t care who. Well, sir, we bombed the bejabbers out of Iraq and no, Iraq wasn’t really to blame, it turned out, but godalmighty, the boys felt one helluva lot better. Poke the bear at your peril, Little Jimmy hollered the day they caught Saddam Hussein in a hidey-hole.
Course, the whole Middle East is a mess now. Never did find those weapons of mass destruction. Now we’re a lot poorer, all those years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But … damn! For awhile there we showed those Arabs who was boss, we surely did. They respect strength, isn’t that so? Forget negotiations, try a little of our special of the day: cruise missiles! Collateral damage, hey, that’s just the mainstream media, pretty good liars themselves.
A lot of folks bought the malarkey our current Leader puts out every day. He had the answers, all simplified and pre-packaged, and we the people bought it hook line and sinker. Not because we really believed the guy, c’mon, he’s the P.T. Barnum of the 21st Century. We just happened to like the lies. You want to believe the world is so complicated, so complex, there’s no hope in trying to figure out stuff. Skip the nuance. We want a tough guy, a guy who would run into that high school bare handed and take down a shooter with an AR-15. Dirty Harry without the 44 Magnum, that’s what we want, and yeah, you know he wouldn’t any more charge into that building unarmed except with a running semi-automatic Mouth, but dammit, somebody’s got to pay for this mayhem and it sure as heck isn’t going to be the NRA.
And anyway, like his soon-to-be-departed long term Communications Director, Hope Hicks said in sworn testimony, they’re just little white lies. The big ones, she refused to answer.
Hits: 316
Tags: How We Won the Iraq War, The Liar-in-Chief, Truthtelling as a Lost Art