When Lying Becomes Truth
On the morning of November 5, 2008, we gathered for our daily worship in Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel. There was much joy and celebration in the air as almost all of those gathered felt a new day had dawned across America. I was doubtful. Perhaps it was the cranky ethicist in me peaking around the corner of ecstasy, maybe it was the pragmatic womanist in me, looking back at history and forward to the future and being ground in the present. Whatever or whoever was my touchstone that morning as the chapel erupted with joy sans my circumspection, I was also absolutely sure that though something things have changed, but most had not and it was going to be a rough four years.
I am bitterly disappointed that I was right. Although President Obama’s list of accomplishments is long (and mixed), a syndrome that W.E.B. Du Bois noted in 1935 in his potent essay, “The Propaganda of History,” is more powerful than ever. Du Bois notes our tendencies that “evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over” to paint “perfect men and noble nations, but [this history] does not tell the truth.” We are being treated to a non-ending feast of not telling the truth during this political season. In the childhood of my youth, this was called “lying” but now it’s “changing the truth.” Somehow, the almost immediate partisan gridlock in Congress after President Obama was elected is being recast as collegiality. Both campaigns (as well as many local and state ones) are playing fast and loose with truth—taking the words of the other candidate out of context, sometimes ridiculously so—with a cavalier attitude about the truth as long as it garners votes and swings public opinion in that candidate’s direction.
There seems no penalty for telling bald-faced lies. Too many of us fail to hold the campaigns accountable while also decrying the lack of leadership we have from the politicians we elect. Well, when we elect people who play fast and loose with the truth, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to expect them to then craft laws and public policies that represent our highest ideals with a concern for citizens across the various diversity spectrums that make up this country once they are in office. The next electoral season is coming and if we do not stand up and live into our responsibility as citizens and demand accountability from our elected officials, we will get more of the same and continue to erode the democratic ideals that are to shape us as a republic.