Why Reality Matters

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

If you were a kid back when I was a kid—the thirties, forties, fifties—you heard that advice often from your elders.  They knew that life was routinely corrupted by those with an axe to grind and the means to spread misinformation.  It’s been going on since mass media emerged.  Newspapers were respected and persuasive just by dint of being published, even when the publishers were trying to start a war or ruin a person by lying to their readers.  Black and white photos were crudely jiggered to create misimpressions a century before “photoshopping” became a powerful technology of deceit.  Rumor mills and radios satisfied listeners’ perennial yearning for bad news about other people.

But it was all child’s play, compared to what is at stake today.

Imagine what our elders would make of a President showing a hundred million Americans videos he doctored to depict one of his political opponents seeming to say something outrageous they never said.  Or telling the Governor of Oregon that she must be wrong about personally witnessing peace in the streets of Portland, because (himself fooled by phony doctoring) he had seen video on Fox News showing a “war-ravaged” Portland on the verge of extinction from massive warfare and widespread destruction. 

Such ludicrously fictional depictions matter, because whenever the President of the United States thinks he or she supposes that some situation warrants being called a “war”, he/she can simply declare that it really is a war.  Sometimes the situation takes on the battlefield features of a real war—like in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq which were never formally designated as wars by Congress.  And other times Presidents use “war” to designate an aggressive attempt to deal with something onerous—the “wars” on drugs, or poverty, or global warming—and use the designation to take actions that might otherwise might be questionable. 

But in the worst cases, they use the designation to attack someone or something they simply want to destroy.  They know that by calling something “war”, they can unleash all manner of cruel actions otherwise prohibited by legal rights and due process.  Why?  Because they can get away with it.  In deference to a Presidential designation, the courts—including the Supreme Court—are exceptionally unlikely to challenge a President’s claiming that something is a war or an insurrection.  They are unwilling to risk that the President may eventually prove to have been right, and they turn out to have hampered his/her protection of the United States from a genuine enemy. 

Presidents can exploit this deference by the courts.  Like right now, when President Donald J. Trump has declared a torrent of “emergencies” in his myriad wars on immigrants, and Democratic rivals, and “stolen” elections, and voter fraud, and “domestic terrorism”, and free speech that criticizes him, and universities’ curricula, and histories of America that acknowledge slavery, and DEI, and abortion, and LGBTQ+ considerations, and the “deep state”, and green sources of energy like solar and wind power, and an ever-growing list of whatever he senses might limit his impulses and his unfettered capacity to destroy whoever displeases him.

We see the most blatant exercise of his shouting “War!” in attacking “the enemy within” Democrat-led cities where he orders the U.S. military and the National Guard to invade and conquer, brandishing loaded weapons and igniting tear gas bombs to teach those protesters a lesson or two.  These provocative encounters are carefully designed to stimulate self-protective reactions by otherwise peaceful protesters—defensive reactions that can later be taken out of context as false proof that the citizenry is willfully engaged in insurrection.  And that, in turn, will seemingly justify the President’s invoking the Insurrection Act, basically empowering the use of military force against any civilians he/she deems an obstacle to the President’s initiatives. 

This Big Lie is being dramatically spread from coast to coast, and it is gaining ground as a normative “truth”.  Saturday night Patti and I were watching (out of morbid curiosity) how Fox News was depicting the “No Kings” rallies.  But what dominated their airwaves instead was appreciative coverage of how Trump’s military invasion was going to “save Chicago”.  Those were the words.  The title on screen under the coverage remained constant for the entire time we kept watching: “Trump sends military to save Chicago.”

I am all for saving Chicago if and when it’s ever in danger.  But the gravest danger to Chicago, and to America, and to you and me, is the permanent distortion of reality.  We are in danger of allowing truth to be widely understood as whatever misinformation is loudest and most persistent.  And now—thanks to AI-created videos and other false-reality creations—the danger is deepened by depictions that are nearly impossible to recognize as bogus.  Coupled with Trump’s new rules forbidding critical reporting of his administration, the task of defining and defending reality is daunting and will only become harder over time.

That is why I think you and I need to declare our own war.  We need to declare war on falsehood. 

We need to declare war on false depictions of life in American cities.  On false declarations of lethal danger “from within”.  On nonstop clamoring about terror in our streets.  On false claims of any kind and every kind that can confuse us.  On incessant fear-mongering spewed to justify further outrageous usurpation of power and blatant disregard of law and due process by Trump and his private army of ICE agents and military troops.

There are not a lot of things we can do to blunt this coup right now, but one thing we can do is to become an impassioned army of truth-tellers.  This is something we can do.  We can speak out every time we see or hear another effort to create false reality.  We can devote ourselves to restoring boundaries between truth and lie, between reality and fantasy, between safety and danger. We can, and we must. 

Think of it as a deadly serious game of Whack-A-Mole.  Every time—not just occasionally, but every single time—you see yet another false depiction of reality that might be used to further trash democratic restraints, shout it out.  Make it clear to those selling the Big Lies that they are being tracked relentlessly by a nationwide guerrilla force dedicated to trashing their assault on truth.  Letters to the Editor.  Calls into talk radio shows.  Social media pictures and posts.  Emails to family and other friends.  Casual conversations. 

Be outraged.  Be outrageous.  Be persistent.  Be obnoxious.  Be a warrior for truth, for reality, for integrity.

We are living in dark times, and those who are darkening it will not cease their efforts.  If anyone is to keep light radiating in our midst right now, surely it must be us.  Dylan Thomas provides the marching orders for our noble war:

Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.