So, I’m sitting here taking in the news about Jussie Smollett and wondering how much more what’s left of my sense of “normalcy” can take. Back in February, I saw, and was persuaded by the impassioned statement made by Chicago police superintendent Eric Johnson, charging and condemning Smollett for what I too considered the heinous crime of staging and lying about a hate crime perpetrated by MAGA-hat-wearing thugs, thereby providing aid and comfort to those who are looking for reasons to deny that such assaults are real. I got swept away by Johnson’s outrage and his certainty. So as far as I was concerned, case closed, details to follow. I simply filed it away with a shake of the head and a tsk tsk about the lengths that some people will go to for the sake of a little bit of notoriety. Apparently, nothing is sacred, no one is ashamed any more, the only thing that matters is what you can get away with.
Of course, others less trusting of the system than I are not surprised by the sudden turn of events. For them, this is part of their day-to-day perception / experience dealing with the police. For them, the system is inherently untrustworthy, and so this new twist in the tale provides them with as much aid and comfort as the earlier story provided to others.
I don’t know what happened in the Jussie case. I can only await further information from my media outlets of choice. But for me, this sudden turnaround has crystalized my thoughts about this weekend’s Mueller shocker. The Barr summary hit me like a bolt from the blue. It created the same sense of unreality I felt when Trump was elected. These cases demonstrate how much a narrative can take root in your head as if the result of one’s own perceptions and experiences, and can then shape the assumptions that form part of the bedrock of one’s world view.
These events, like so many others, are beyond our personal ability to verify and to develop an informed opinion / reaction. We rely upon the extended sensory organs known as the media (including social media and other online sources) to seek out those areas beyond our personal reach and report back to us what they find. We can try to corroborate as best we can, but for the most part, in the end we are at the mercy of those media inputs, left only with the choice between acceptance or rejection. It is a relationship based really on trust.
It is upon that space of uncertainty and dependence, against that very fragile relationship of trust, where the assault on Truth has been most effective. Ironically, the concept of cultural relativism, which seemed to me to be the correct and just approach to evaluating and understanding values or history or politics, indeed all of the subjective sciences, that reasonable concept has in many ways been responsible for the most devastating impact on the idea of an objective Truth — It has opened the door to the idea of alternative truths.
Now of course, there is a distinction to be made between genuine alternative takes on events and the deliberate manufacturing of alternative narratives in order to push a particular agenda. But as I am learning in this age of Trump, this distinction is mostly lost under the glare of hyper-tribalism, and the high-speed, capitalist-inspired imperative to “give the people what they want.” It still matters, but it is not particularly distinctive and certainly not determinative.
I had not realized the extent to which I had automatically accepted the narrative that Trump had in some way interacted with Russia’s disruption of the election. For me, it was a further indication of what kind of man Trump was, and to tell you the Truth, I still believe that something is there, although perhaps not something provable by a criminal investigation like Mueller’s; the idea that this man would rebuff Russian overtures to help his campaign by digging up dirt on Hillary is preposterous to me!
But regardless of the Truth (which could have been an alternative title to this post), what has happened is that the Dems have been politically roped-a-dope into relying so much on the Mueller investigation in uncovering the Truth and defeating Trump that they have now been thrown into apparent disarray. I can see and hear the panic in the voices of leftist commentators and Democratic congressional leaders as they attempt to rationalize their previous stance and stubbornly proclaim that they will continue down this road.
But the Dems are in a bind now. Should they go ahead pressing forward with their investigations, their attack on Barr’s letter, their (desperate?) certainty that the underlying facts of the Mueller report itself will provide the justification for their continued skepticism of what is being portrayed as the Truth? It’s not an easy decision, because there is no easy way for them to continue without it appearing to be merely “sour grapes,” that they are poor losers, that their ultimate goal is not Truth but only the partisan and tribal objective of taking down Trump.
What is even more distressing is that, in this present environment, even if their persistence uncovers the proverbial “smoking gun,” it is highly probable that it will not move the needle much at all, even among those in the middle who are not hard-core Trump supporters. Truth has been compromised so regularly lately, Smollett being merely the latest example, that one is free to disregard proof, evidence, facts without a second thought. Those can be swatted away with a more satisfying competing narrative, or placed in the limbo of “who really knows what’s true?”
This has become the normal way of thinking. Reality is now regularly reconceived in order to accommodate one’s passions, and what were once rock-solid moral certainties are easily reshaped, often without a second thought, in order to justify what one has revealed themselves to have become. What is a “smoking gun” in one narrative or world view can be comfortably cast as a political prop, a frame job, a lie, in another. Truth has become a menu item, and any choice is as good as another.
And this is where the whole impeachment thing becomes problematic. The main thing to understand is that impeachment is just an indictment. The actual removal from office is the result of a trial in the GOP-led Senate and requires 2/3 of the votes for conviction. Under current political reality, that will never happen. So then what is the purpose of impeachment, especially if Trump can so easily present it as the sore-loser-Dems trying to smear the President?
When most of us were younger, Truth was determinative. Once the Truth was discovered, the consequences flowed from that Truth. Justice was the process of determining the Truth. And the Truth was enough to determine Justice. And so the search for Truth was weighty, important. I do not feel this is still the case.
It seems to me that we are in an environment where Truth is irrelevant, just a piece of information worthy of no greater consideration than any other, literally just another piece to be manipulated and sacrificed in the winner-take-all game that our politics has become.
So I am pessimistic that there can be any smoking gun that will result in Trump’s downfall. What is more, I am worried that the Dems persistence will be easily spun and easily interpreted as a partisan… witch hunt. So if uncovering the Truth will be ineffective, and the search for Truth could be used against them, then why bother continuing with these aggressive investigations?
But imagine the alternative…
What if the Dems, because of these political calculations, just stopped? Just think about that for a second. What would that look like? All of that time and energy, and then… silence? Our sovereignty penetrated, our democratic processes attacked, our social differences exploited by a hostile foreign power, and perhaps with the tacit if not the active cooperation of our current Commander in Chief… and nothing? No response at all? As if it never happened?
The thought of that acceptance, that surrender is intolerable. Because we know something happened, but what? We know we are under assault, but how? We understand that old boundaries are being erased, but where are the new ones? Are we to simply continue down the path with eyes firmly shut, whistling in the dark, certain that there is something there, perhaps something harmful, yet unwilling to take a look, relying instead upon the word of a known liar, putting our safety in the hands of someone who clearly places his own safety above that of the nation?
So much has been allowed to become normalized in this era of Trump. Certainly being caught in a lie does not appear to mean much anymore. Certainly the press, who have helped in this perception, has had its reputation sullied. And ironically, even those of us on the left accept that the DOJ, the courts, the government as purely partisan instruments that serve the interest of the ruling tribe, or in the case of Trump, of the ruling individual, institutions whose integrity have long been compromised and whose proclamations are only acceptable to the degree in which they conform to what we already believe.
And yet, somehow the search for the Truth, no matter how clumsy or unpopular or risky has to continue, doesn’t it? We cannot simply turn away from that because of expediency. In a world that seems to have slipped its moorings, where ideological subjectivity rules, we must continue to uphold a belief in the value of Truth, or else we are simply lost at sea, at the mercy of the whims and weaknesses of a single group or worse, a single individual.
So we must proceed with this search, not because it will result in Trump’s removal or even with the hope that it will weaken him. We must proceed because what we are ultimately fighting for is the relevancy of Truth itself. The Truth must be lifted up and fought for and amplified not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, the final and most precious destination of all.
But we must do so with the following caveats: It must be done with an understanding of the political perceptions. It must be done in a smart way — shrill, unsubstantiated (meaning dependent solely upon news reports) attacks cannot be tolerated. And we must understand that it is not enough to simply present the Truth, ta da! And it must be remembered that the final jury is not the already committed but the vast middle which does not necessarily share our assumptions. It matters how we proceed.
The case must be made, with great care and with an obvious reverence for the Truth.
Originally published at www.yabberz.com.
