Because You Never Asked

 

(5/08, Spain)

     The great Spanish writer, Juan Jose Millas, has appeared in these pages before. For those interested in a more thorough biography, the essay “Suicide, Guantanamo Style” would be the proper reference point. The fact that his syndicated newspaper column appears regularly in a local paper where I stay has greatly enriched my life.

     I write this exercise in dubious philosophical patter on just my second day of residence during my annual two month stay by the Roman Sea. Last night, I read my first “Millas” of the Mediterranean season, and, as is often the case, it blew me away.

     The article in question had its inspiration in the routine mendacity of some prominent politicians and clergymen. Near the end of the piece, Millas makes mention of a French politico-businessman named Jerome Kerviel. Kerviel’s fiscal expertise resulted in the loss of 5 billion euros ($8 billion) for the second largest bank of France. In an interview after his fall, the great financier said, “one loses the notion of quantity when dealing with such sums of money. Everything dematerializes. You get carried away.”

     I now quote the words of Millas directly: “Something similar happens with lying. We can detect the first lie, the second, the third, but after a certain amount of lying it begins to dematerialize, obliging us to penetrate in a moral atmosphere where there is no right or left, nor up or down. To be lead by the lie, when it reaches such industrial sizes, is like driving in a dense fog. You see nothing.” He goes on to talk of how the nation’s politicians (and this includes segments of the clergy) have become so well adjusted to lying, they do not see the suffering of average people. It has all “dematerialized”.

     An essay appears in this now voluminous series which is titled, “The DMZ (The Demoralized Zone)”. Its genetic makeup is similar to the “Millas” now being discussed, but in reading Millas’ article, some notions that had been kicking around in my deductive organs came clearly into focus. I realized there is a “yang” to the “ying” of both the Millas article and my DMZ essay. It goes something like this:

     What we are talking about here are cultures where lying has become institutionally acceptable. The most obvious form of this disease is in the political arena, though it effects all facets of life. The politicians know they are lying. The public knows they are lying. The politicians know the public knows. This dog keeps chasing its tail, and yet, it seems to have become the only permissible way to conduct these affairs. They lie, we listen, the pundits smugly decode it for us, and the election decides which lies and liars we mistrust the least.

     This is the “ying“.

     In such an emotional climate, where the lie is normalized, the truth becomes the target of scorn. Anyone actually speaking the truth is quickly ridiculed and marginalized. The truth teller becomes a pariah, is portrayed as something radical. At the very least, such person is put before the court of public opinion where he or she must explain such dastardly behavior.

     This is the “yang“.

     American politics, along with other facets of its culture, readily exhibits such symptoms. Some recent incidents during the Democrat primary season show the disease is alive and well, but I’ll start with some more distant, vaguer examples.

     There are some people on the American political scene that have the audacity (how dare they) to say things that are true. Such figures as Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich on the left, and Ron Paul on the right, continue to pester and badger the rest of us with this annoying thing called the truth. They’re something like the kid whose father takes him golfing and says, “dad, you got a 7 on that hole, not a 5.” I mean, hey, who needs that? As a result, the power elites give them some theatrical moments with us --- democracy, freedom, and all that --- before easily finding ways to get them off the golf course. They can’t raise money, the media tells us how radical they are, and before you can say Hillary Clinton, they’ve become fodder for Jay Leno, tolerated for awhile, but not to be taken seriously.

     And nobody does, because the truth is such an ugly thing in a system constructed for the lie.

     Perhaps the biggest lie now being lived in the United States is our health care system. Its format as a private, market driven business venture is unique in the world. By now, everyone can recognize the wreckage of its idiocy. It is expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t come close to providing the best care. It owes its existence purely to the fact that the drug companies and the insurance industry, with the huge amounts of capital they represent, have elected “their” government. In a sense, we all know this, both exploiters and exploited.

     So along comes someone like Michael Moore who makes a clear, straight forward movie called “Sicko”. It debunks all the myths, cuts through all the propaganda, and shows our way of dealing with sickness to be the farce it really is. None of the film’s critics, in spite of their negativity, can point to anything in the film and say, “ah hah, that’s a crock.”

     And yet, rather than convince, it seems to have offended America. How dare this man come along and tell us they do it better in other countries. The nerve of this man, telling us an institutionalized enemy of the United States, a third world country full of negros and mulattos, a place where they speak, for God’s sake, Spanish! ---  does it better than us. How dare he tell the truth!

     When the lie becomes respectable, the truth becomes an insult.

     There is a similar situation with regard to the war in Iraq. By now, almost all of us have some dim awareness that oil was the major element leading to this disaster and everything else was just a pretense. But to say it in mainstream circles is simply not allowed. No Big Media outlet will utter such truisms. Any politician expressing such a view would be vilified, probably into extinction.

     The truth becomes the outlaw, while the lie --- the idea that America would not do such a thing for such banal, selfish reasons --- becomes the law abiding citizen.

     Religion is another area of pervasive posturing in the United States. In the other western style democracies, the degree of religious devotion shown by a candidate could be considered irrelevant. How different it is for an American politician, who must always maintain and flaunt a solid foundation of God-fearing, church going “faith”. Imagine a candidate saying something like this: “Well, I really don’t arrange my life around such concepts as God or faith. My morality comes from within, from the knowledge that how I treat others is directly related to how they treat me. If others need God and faith to accomplish the same thing, I have no quarrel with that. What matters is knowing good from bad, and there are many ways to get there.”

     In America, this person’s political career is now over, in spite of the fact that millions of Americans have similar feelings, including, I’m sure, many of the people now representing us in the halls of Congress and other facets of government.

     But when the lie becomes the good kid, the truth becomes the juvenile delinquent.

     Some of the problems Barak Obama has faced in his quest for the presidency are sprung directly from this religious burlesque American politicians are chained to. The first incident occurred in San Francisco. The candidate was waxing poetically about small town America, whose fortunes have been spiraling downward as the global economy goes elsewhere for cheaper labor. While surrounded by adoring fans he was relaxed enough to forget Barak the candidate as he morphed into Barak the philosopher.

     Disaster!

     Like a professor in a lecture hall, he began to link small town America’s frustrations to their exaggerated adherence to guns and religion. It took about a week to finally get it behind him and it surely hurt his showing in the Pennsylvania primary. But if we objectively analyze his remarks, we see little more than a thoughtful exercise in intelligent discourse, one that can be debated and mulled over, one that surely contains a healthy dose of truth.

     But when the lie becomes the currency of exchange, the truth becomes worthless.

     And this brings us directly to the main event, the Hollywood production that has come very close to costing Obama the fight.

     Like all American politicians, Obama supposedly attends a church and has a “shepherd” of God he calls his own. This is necessary baggage for anyone traveling this road in America. The Reverend Wright is not your average pastor, which is not that surprising, because Barak Obama is not your average politician. As we all surely know, some Rovian political tacticians dug up a few minutes of a Reverend Wright rant against the policies of the generic American government. Inflammatory stuff, to be sure, especially when delivered with the messianic style of an articulate black preacher. This can scare the crap out of your average honky and Obama’s enemies began hitting on it, with the help of Big Media, like a compulsive eater who just can’t stop. The straw that has come very close to breaking “Hussein’s” camel’s back had to do with terrorism and how the Reverend Wright defined it. He suggested the United States was a terrorist nation --- oh my God!

     I’ve listened to the Wright rant a number of times. For the most part, I find little in it that strays very far from the truth, and least of all the terrorist reference. Lest I remind you, the United States has made an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation at peace with the world, leading to the horrifying apocalypse the Iraqi people are now suffering in (the suffering of the Iraqi people is surely something that has “dematerialized” in the United States amidst all the lies). There are many ways to describe such an immoral act, and “terrorism” (it’s terrible) seems not an illogical choice.

     But when the lie is heavily marketed, the truth goes out of business.

     When the masses become comfortable with the lie, the truth becomes an agent of suspicious unrest.

     There is a Ying and a Yang here, an unfortunate one that contemporary America is now mired in.

     Post Script: While preparing this essay on my computer, another story broke that fits neatly into this essay. Former presidential candidate, Gen. Wesley Clark, like anyone opposed to John McCain, is sick of the fact that McCain’s only presidential credential  seems to be that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Clark, in saying that being a prisoner of war is nothing that proves one’s military competence, has had the gall to say not only the truth, but an obvious truth. The fact that even Barak Obama has distanced himself from Clark’s remarks is vivid proof of just how devalued the truth has become in our society.           

     Relevant Material: “At this juncture in history, I find it easy to say that our electoral campaigns are fought almost exclusively within the “Demoralized Zone”. The concepts “truth” and “lie” have been so obliterated that all we have left is a disorienting pea soup fog lacking any clarity whatsoever”. From the essay “The Demoralized Zone (The DMZ)”, from the book of essays ”Because You Never Asked”, by this writer.