Opinion/Editorial
TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH
“What we’ve got here is…a failure in communication,” and so the warden of the prison said to Luke when it appeared that Luke’s behavior was in such contravention to what was proscribed that no other explanation would suffice. Today, in America, we have the most devastating and mind-numbing failure in communication our culture has ever experienced. The transformation of a society critically sensitive to fact, truth, and ‘straight shooting,’ has become one of deadened acceptance. Where once nuance, with respect to what was real or illusory, truth or lie, was debated with active enthusiasm, we now have calm acceptance. This acceptance is not of the fact or truth. This acceptance is of open surrender to illusion and lies.
The deadening of societal values following such near universal acceptance is staggering to view and contemplate. Notable figures stand before the public, coming into homes, cars, and businesses everywhere, and blatantly tell falsehoods they know to be such. Filtering sources (pundits, newscasters, and anchors) blithely mention the ‘misstatements’ or ‘political gaffs,’ and then move on, as if such material and deliberate lies are blunders from some temporarily disassociated cause.
Whether former president Donald Trump is a liar or not (and others who’ve done the same thing in both parties) is not the real indicator of such grave concern as the more general issue which goes straight to the heart of this new rending tear in our social fabric. There are no voices of righteousness embedded into the wave of our currently developed and vastly influential communications system. There are no Cronkites, Morrows or even Jennings left to call foul, and then to hold patiently and rigorously such hugely revealing lies up to the public’s attention. Our communications system has become amorphous, fluid and insidiously damaged by its deliberate inability to hold any notable figure accountable for demonstrated lying behavior. Just as polling and surveys were taken from the shattered wreck of academia’s once vaunted sociological bastions and sold off to the private companies (once rigorously juried objective data converted to slanted results based upon payment), the national mass media sources have relegated truthful accountability to the minor lapping backwaters of the blogosphere.
Cool Hand Luke is a fictional character from a fictional movie, but the example serves to illustrate how great a disconnect has developed between our notable leaders and the public charged to analyzing, judging and then electing them to office. The deadening of America’s morality has not been limited to applicants or holders of political office. Statements and conclusions about hugely powerful physical events have also enjoyed the attention of our national communications failure. The Iraq war, and the war in Afghanistan serve as perfect examples. We went to war in Iraq based on what we all know to be lies, yet our troops remained there many years after the public gained this knowledge. We were at war in Afghanistan with a Taliban enemy that was never our enemy while the great Satan of our time (Bin Laden) lays dead at the bottom of some foreign sea. We refuse to do anything more about the frightful disaster of 911, although any examination of available public data makes our government’s explanation for what happened look like the grand web of lies it has to be.
Without truth, and a vigorous pursuit of truth, there can be no progress of almost any kind. America sits atop a calming sea of windless lies, deadened to what is occurring in the present, uncaring of what happened in the past, and unable to move forward into a gentling wind of any kind of productive future.
Cool Hand Luke was a fictional man of action and that is where our analogous representation breaks down. America has become a nation of staggeringly devastating inaction, as its very foundations are glued to the surface of a sticky windless sea of misstatements, misrepresentations, and glaringly evident lies. The nation’s only actions are to strike outward in all directions in order to prevent the bitter stagnation, deliberately wrought by a few wealthy men and women, from being revealed for what it is. American exceptionalism, once defined as a quality setting our culture above that of all other nations on earth, has become an emblem of our own blind avoidance of self-evident unappreciated truth. There can be no recovery, cultural or economic, without the acceptance of truth and the rejection of lies.
There can be no American recovery without the return to a communications system wherein truthful men and women are rewarded with acceptance while liars are punished and banished from the culture.
