CSotD: Alternative Facts, Outsourced Thinking
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I was hoping to do another day of humor while we wait for a few facts to emerge, but we don’t seem to be waiting for facts, so here we are. One Sunday strip will have to suffice.
When Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” in 2017, it touched off a lot of mockery. After all, the question being posed was how many people showed up for Donald Trump’s inauguration, which wasn’t even a math problem: It was arithmetic.
There was a time when facts were true and things that were false were not facts. Daniel O’Connell made a famous joke on the topic in an Irish courtroom, at the expense of his opponent.
But Conway’s twisted concept was embraced by Trump partisans, who argued that the head count was wrong, that the photographs were taken before the event began, and found ways to prove to their own satisfaction that claims of a huge turnout were correct despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
It was only a sample of the alternative facts that would flow from the White House in those days to be accepted by loyalists and laughed at by others.
Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, lies were lies and were told with purpose, as in 1969, when the Chicago police shot Fred Hampton in his bed and declared that they’d been under heavy fire from the Black Panthers, a claim the Chicago Tribune dutifully passed on to its readers.
But a reporter from the Sun-Times performed an act of journalism: He went to the apartment and looked for himself and found that the “bullet holes” in the police photos were, in fact, nail heads.
That was well before the Internet made experts of everyone and alternative facts became the norm, whether they were spread as deliberate lies, mistaken rumors or outright foolishness.
Not that we didn’t already have people who were convinced that the Moon landing was a hoax and Elvis Presley was alive and working at a gas station.
In the case of Charlie Kirk’s murder, it hasn’t helped that the president began things before a suspect was even identified, declaring that the killing was the work of the far left, and that it was part of a conspiracy.
Trump, however, was only one in a crowd of experts who explained matters before any real evidence was in hand, and the Internet sleuths then piled on with additional alternative facts once they knew that the young man was the son of Republican Mormons.
After all, how could a young person ever turn away from their parents’ political and religious beliefs? Obviously, he was surely a conservative, not a liberal.
Which reminds me of a classmate who grew his hair and began smoking dope freshman year. His father yanked him out of our college and enrolled him at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, which promised greater supervision of the lad.
But he came back to visit a year later and told us of how his rebellion continued, and that he had even burned down the ROTC building. Which seemed surprising, since such a story would have at least hit the underground press if not the mainstream news.
But it had only made the local paper, because back in those days, alternative facts didn’t get nearly so far.
Now it seems that the suspect in the murder isn’t a leftist after all. But Boris is leaping to a conclusion here, because it also seems equally true that he was. And that he was also from the far right.
He’s whatever you need him to be. That’s the essence of alternative facts: They’re completely malleable.
Both police and reporters are used to eyewitness descriptions of tall short blond dark-haired slim fat suspects. I once had to leave my dinner to come back to the newsroom and check out a witness who claimed the police had poured a massive volley of shots into a vehicle I had seen and even photographed that did not contain a single bullet hole.
But Channel Five aired the interview, so I was obligated to doublecheck the obvious. While my dinner got cold, goddammit.
Here’s a CNN report updated last night that tells what is known and what is speculated, but the Guardian had to withdraw quotes from an interview that apparently came from one of those reliable eyewitnesses.
And I just got yelled at on-line for pointing out that people are making claims without sources, and for suggesting that the entire nation should probably STFU until some not-so-alternative facts emerge.
Which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
You’d have to search to find two cartoonists with more opposing POVs than Allie and Matson, but I’m not comfortable with the widespread notion that Kirk set up his debating table with an intention to establish genuine dialogue.
Unless someone has kept a running score of how often he said, “Oh, you’ve proven me wrong. I’m going to have to rethink this!”
Or how often he set up his table amid a gathering of liberals rather than in the friendly confines of a crowd that agreed with him from the start.
None of which in any way justifies his murder, but does justify maintaining a little skepticism about his openness to opposing viewpoints.
Not “cynicism,” which rejects the idea without examination. But “skepticism,” which demands proof.
Meanwhile, people are being fired for “inappropriate” comments about Kirk or his murder, though while Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for suggesting that hostile rhetoric can provoke violence, Fox doesn’t mind that Brian Kilmeade suggested executing the homeless.
Perhaps you never noticed the asterisk following the First Amendment.
Varvel declares that failure to accept Dear Leader’s pronouncements as truth is a mental defect that leads to political murder, though he doesn’t explain how that influenced the Trump supporter who slaughtered a Minnesota lawmaker, her husband and their dog, or how it influenced the Trump supporter who attacked Paul Pelosi or the Trump supporters who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer.
It’s one of those alternative facts that applies when it does and disappears like a morning mist when it doesn’t.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
This is a Take-Your-Pick juxtaposition: Darkow says we’ve had all the murders we can possibly take, and Jennings says “oh, hardly.”
If you can’t decide, log on to the social commentary site of your choice.
Someone there will surely confirm whichever direction you’re leaning.
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