CSotD: Subjective Truth, Alternative Facts
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The story of George Washington and the cherry tree never happened; it was one of the tales invented by Parson Weems in a biography he wrote after Washington’s death, for which he made up stories to demonstrate the president’s virtues.
Margulies updates the story to bring it in line with our current president, who makes up his own version of the truth to demonstrate his virtues and the righteousness of his policies.
It fits an old joke that goes back at least to FDR, that goes “George Washington couldn’t tell a lie, (recent president) couldn’t tell the truth, and (current president) can’t tell the difference.”
Only now that latter point may actually be true of our current president, who genuinely appears to believe the outrageous, easily disproven whoppers he tells. The psychological phenomenon is amusing when a student begins to honestly believe the dog ate his homework, not nearly so amusing when OJ Simpson vowed to find the person who killed his wife.
And just as patriotic Americans may believe the story of Washington and the cherry tree, their respect for the office of the president may lead them to believe the things Donald Trump says, even when there is clear and obvious evidence to the contrary.
Trump may not know whether he is repeating something he misheard or making up something out of whole cloth, but he does understand the extent to which his MAGA loyalists trust him. One of the true things he has said was at a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016, when he said
I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.
Matson extends this incredible phenomenon, suggesting that the president is in the process of putting it to the test. The nation, and the world, are involved in that experiment, and we have not yet seen the results.
It’s hard to judge how well his flood of lies, and the actions taken on behalf of them, are really going over with the public. For one thing, the sample is spoiled by the profusion of bots and Russian trolls on social media, such that you can’t tell the genuine believers from the fictional supporters who chime in.
There are also professional commentators like Jesse Watters, whose stock in trade consists of backing up whatever theories the president advances, on partisan networks and in partisan newspapers dedicated to promoting unquestioning loyalty to the central government.
And, like the old urban legend in which “the call is coming from inside the house,” there are the members of Dear Leader’s cabinet chosen not for expertise or even rudimentary competence but for an unquestioning loyalty that increasingly seems based on rampant gullibility rather than deliberate dishonesty.
The most obvious example, until very recently, had been the fact that, rather than trying to rationalize the president’s tangled business deals, Karoline Leavitt angrily insists that he has lost money since becoming president.
She might as well insist that he can fly, but she does it without any sense of how ridiculous her loyal proclamations sound to anyone outside the White House echo chamber.
Now she has a rival in the contest. The Secretary of Homeland Security — a position originated by highly respected former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge — is currently a former beauty queen and not-so-highly respected ex-governor whose claim to fame is not so much that she shot a puppy she couldn’t train but that she had the astonishingly bad judgment to tell the story on herself.
And now she’s telling stories about another disobedient victim who she feels needed to be shot and killed.
And she’s done it in a outsized cowboy hat that emphasizes her nicknames of “ICE Barbie” and “Kosplay Kristi” based on her vainglorious tendency to play dress-up. The women of Charlie’s Angels maintained more professional appearances even portraying quasi-macho beauties on a TV show.
Other women more knowledgeable and experienced may have a different perspective.
But as Bravo suggests, you cross Kosplay Kristi at your peril, because she has the power to declare you a terrorist without a trial or even an investigation, in a setting in which terrorists can be summarily executed, in boats or SUVs.
And woe betide anyone who doesn’t kowtow, as Jake Tapper discovered when he interviewed her the other night: She responded to questions with an attitude of “How Dare You,” and an insistence that he view things her way even when her way does not reflect what the facts show or comport with the most basic logic.
In her world, defying the orders of an officer and making any sort of active response justifies the officer shooting the miscreant, but she couldn’t process Jake Tapper’s point that those who assaulted police on the steps of the Capitol were far more violent than rude people in Minnesota.
She rationalizes that each situation is different, without being able to concede that deadly assaults are different than driving a car in a way that causes an ICE officer to take one step to the left.
Nor did she respond to Tapper’s point that, while the president and his allies are justifying the killing of Renee Good for driving away from a confrontation, people who violently assaulted officers in Washington and were convicted by juries of having done so, were pardoned, and some of them went on to commit additional crimes.
The problem, she said, is that demonstrators had been rude to ICE officers earlier in the day, that the officer who fired the fatal shot had once had a violent confrontation in another city with a different person, and that (though you have to see the whole interview or read the transcript to fully get it), Jake Tapper is guilty of asking her difficult questions.
But every situation is different, and saying “I’m not mad at you” and driving away is apparently far worse than being a tourist on a visit to the Capitol hoping to meet, and hang, our legislators.
The moral of the story? Be quiet, behave in an orderly fashion, follow orders, trust our government, and always tell the truth, like George, and like Kristi, and like Donald.
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