What’s on my mind — 01/21/20

Some things I’ve been thinking about

Is that true?

Yesterday was MLK day. I spent the day mostly working, but also made time to go on a hike with some friends and — of course — reflect on the meaning of the day as I scrolled through social media posts about MLK’s legacy.

And then I came across this article: Read the Letter the FBI Sent MLK to Try to Convince Him to Kill Himself

As someone who is generally skeptical of government, I couldn’t not click. I skimmed the article. The FBI bullying and threatening an activist. I’m enough of a realist that this did not faze me. But then the subject of their threat, the topic of their blackmail caught my eye — “sexual orgies”. Wait… what!?

Further internet scrolling seemed to indicate that there was not no reason to believe such allegations, but that they were unprovable either way at least until 2027 when the archives of supposed evidence become public.

Even then, though, who is to say?

Over the Christmas holiday, as rumblings of Trump starting a war with Iran rippled their way across social media, I re-watched the old movie Wag the Dog. In the film, Robert Deniro and Anne Heche are aides to the incumbent president ahead of the election. The president gets accused of sexual misconduct in the Oval office by an underage women… and the president’s campaign needs to distract the public, big time.

Robert and Anne ship out to Los Angeles and hire on Dustin Hoffman who plays a green-juice-drinking, tanning-bed-addicted Hollywood producer. What is he producing for them? A war.

He doesn’t just produce film footage of violence happening in a far-flung region. He produces victims and heroes. He produces old-timey American folk songs that he backdates and hides in the Library of Congress, so they can be rediscovered and used as propaganda. He produces participatory performance art across the country, engaging the patriotism of the populace.

There was a lot about the film that struck close to home.

Not just the idea of a president going to war to boost numbers ahead of an election.

Not just the sex scandal.

But the reality distortion. The idea of fake news.

Deniro: What’s the thing people remember about the Gulf War? A bomb falling down a chimney. The truth: I was in the building where we shot that shot, with a one-tenth scale model made out of Legos.

Hoffman: Is that true?

Deniro: How the fuck should we know? Take my point?

Going back to MLK, even if the evidence in the archives does implicate him in some sort of sexual misconduct, who is to say if that evidence is real? Who is to say the FBI didn’t fabricate it to back up the threat they sent over to him? How the fuck should we know?

I quickly spiral down this line of thinking: how the fuck should we know anything?

In a world of deepfakes, fake news, and alternative facts, how can we actually know anything? And anyone who thinks a blockchain might come along and help should think again.

So are we just doomed to live in a purple pill Matrix? Not having taken either the blue pill or the red pill, but having taken a third pill that keeps us locked in the hell of knowing that our reality is not quite real but simultaneously knowing that whatever the reality is, is unknowable?

Maybe. But if I have one glimmer of optimism in all this it is that things are getting better. Wag the Dog reminded me that these are not new problems, unique to our time. These problem of trust, deception, and manipulation date back to the Roman Empire, to Han China, to the people settled on the Tigris and Euphrates. The difference now, and the cause for optimism, is that at least we are talking about the problem.