Trumpism Is Not a Rashomon Effect
Truth matters
In a Pulse article, Michael Lissack attempts to apply the “Rashomon effect” to Donald Trump and his political movement:
The rise of Donald Trump demands that Americans become well acquainted with Rashomon.
Too many of us, regardless of where we live or who we voted for, seem to hold the deep belief that there is such a thing as “the truth” and that they have personal access to it.
The Rashomon effect says no — there can indeed be multiple truths — all valid depending upon the frame used to make sense out of a situation. Rashomon disputes the notion that there exists any privileged frame or any absolute truth.
There are just enough grains of truth in Lissack’s essay to make it insidiously deceptive. Even half true is all wrong.
The movie Rashomon demonstrates a fact well known to most students of jurisprudence: Eyewitness testimony is a highly unreliable form of evidence.
But Prof. Robert Anderson’s explanation of the “Rashomon effect” shows how seriously Lissack misinterprets it:
[T]he Rashomon effect is not only about differences in perspective. It occurs particularly where such differences arise in combination with the absence of evidence to elevate or disqualify any version of the truth, plus the social pressure for closure on the question.
So Lissack’s implication that all evidence is subjective and arbitrary is not only wrong but dangerous — especially in relation to the palpable danger of Trumpism.
To the extent that there might be some perverse relevance of Rashomon to Trump, it could be in the case of the Central Park Five. As Janell Ross reported in October in The Washington Post, in that 1989 case of a female jogger beaten and raped in the park,
…five black and Latino teenage boys, now men…were wrongfully convicted on coerced confessions that were full of details inconsistent with the crime scene and evidence.
When the rape occurred, the teens were in police custody, rounded up with others on suspicion that they had been involved in other crimes in the park that night. When prosecutors took each of the five to trial, they were aware that they had no DNA linking any of them to the rape and did have DNA evidence linking a sixth, then-unidentified man to the crime. The actual rapist later confessed to the crime, but each of the Central Park Five had already served substantial prison terms and been released.
So in contrast to the Rashomon scenario, in this case there was not merely ambiguous, tainted testimony. Rather, there was concrete, empirical evidence showing that a person other than the accused boys was guilty of the crime, and that they were not.
Two weeks after the incident in 1989 — before any trial — Donald Trump spent $85,000 on full-page newspaper ads that cited the Central Park case and called for curtailing civil rights and reinstating the death penalty. During the recent election campaign, in October, Trump doubled down rather than admit error. Ross observed:
This week, when confronted again with just how wrong he was about the Central Park Five, Trump not only refused to acknowledge widely reported and well-known facts or the court’s official actions in the case. He did not simply refuse to apologize: He described the men as guilty, and then demonstrated, once again, that he is a master at the dark art of using long-standing racial fears, stereotypes and anxieties to advance his personal and political goals.
As reported in The Guardian, Yusef Salaam (one of the five) claimed that Trump “was the fire starter,” as “common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.” Salaam and his family received death threats after papers ran Trump’s full-page ad. Michael Warren, the boys’ attorney, argued that Trump’s advertisements played a role in securing conviction, saying that “he poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim,” and that “notwithstanding the jurors’ assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.”
To the extent movies can teach useful lessons, and they may, there are other, far more pertinent films to view to prepare for the threat of Trumpism. Some suggestions:
● The Ox Bow Incident — A tonic for Rashomon, it shows how believing false narratives can have lethal consequences.
● All the King’s Men — Based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel, inspired by the rise and fall of demagogue Huey Long.
● Citizen Kane — Somewhat like Rashomon, there is ambiguous testimony about what made Charles Foster Kane tick. But there is no ambiguity about the corruption spawned by the marriage of blind ambition and immense wealth.
● All the President’s Men — How Washington Post reporters exposed the Watergate crimes of the Nixon administration.
● Spotlight — “The true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Catholic Church to its core.” (And yes, there are true stories.)
● All the Way — The inside story of Lyndon Johnson’s fight for the Civil Rights Act, it underscores the tragic implications of Trump’s election for human rights.
● A Face in the Crowd — An entertainer becomes a demagogue. Will the fraud be exposed?
● Meet John Doe — A fraud is used to spark a sinister political movement.
● Galileo — The archetype case of the political repression of scientific truth.
● Good Night and Good Luck — Edward R. Murrow and CBS News bring down McCarthyism.
● The Army-McCarthy hearings — what McCarthyism looked like. (Note McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, who later became Donald Trump’s mentor.)
● The Winds of War — Herman Work’s intimate view of the Nazi ascent toward war.
● Mussolini: The Untold Story — A media star becomes Il Duce.
And last, but far from least….
● Judgment at Nuremberg — in particular this scene, about lies and telling the truth:
We had a democracy, yes. But it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear.
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Copyright 2017, Lewis J. Perelman
This article was originally published in Pulse.
Also see my related article Saving the Republic from Trump in this publication.
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