When does something count as a “BIG LIE”?

A timely title, no?

The other day I bought a Wall Street Journal for the first time in months, curious to see what it would have to say about President Biden stepping down from the 2024 campaign and endorsing Kamala Harris. In an extraordinary opinion piece, headlined (and I realize that writers do not provide headlines themselves) “Democrats Will Pay for the Biden Big Lie,” Matthew Hennessey wrote that Biden’s announcement 

...brings to an end the big lie Democrats have been telling about the president for at least a year and maybe longer — that he is in full control of his mental faculties…. 

 

What can I say about such a leap of logic? But wait. Let’s go back to Hennessey’s first paragraph: 

 

President Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to abandon his failing bid for re-election. Well, someone call the Vatican: I’d like to report the second coming.

 

My first question: Do Christians say the Lord must appear again on earth for Him to speak to his believers? I never heard that.

 

Leave religion aside, though, and let's address politics: No one is ever in a race for office until that person officially declares. It’s all denial, denial, denial until the announcement. Similarly, no one is ever dropping out until that person announces his or her campaign is over. That’s the way the game is played. Grow up, Matthew. You didn't know that?

 

As for “lying” on the part of Democrats, how does MH conclude, from Biden’s dropping out of the race, either (1) that the president's mental faculties are failing or (2) that other Democrats believed that to be the case and have been lying about it? As I say, quite a leap. Reaching such a conclusion would require at least one additional premise, but, if MH does have another, he has hidden it well.

 

If you want to judge President Biden’s mental strength, you have only to watch and listen to his interview with Lester Holt. In that exchange, it’s obvious that Joe’s mind is still sharp as a tack. His voice is weak, and he is showing the fragility of age, but his thinking is clear — unlike that of the Republican candidate. 

 

As for “big lies,” who is the champion? Who kept claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who is still claiming, in the face of a mountain of disconfirming evidence, that the 2020 was “rigged,” “stolen,” etc., etc.? 

 

Has the Republican nominee, I wonder, made any true public statements? Let’s have one quoted, please. Just one substantive true statement. I’m waiting....

 

The Screaming Lie

When I was six years old, my best neighborhood buddy was a five-year-old boy named Jimmy. We climbed the apple tree in my backyard together, and we watched television together at his house. (Our family had no TV.) One day Jimmy and I wandered up to little Maureen’s house to play in her sandbox while she and her family were away from home. 

There had been rain the night before, and the sandbox was uncovered, so the sand was soupy and wouldn’t hold shapes well in the rain-filled box. We enjoyed dribbling wet sand through our fingers for a while. Then we discovered — and oh, the joy of childhood discovery, independent of adult guidance! — that if we threw dripping globs of it onto the nearby asphalt siding shingles of Maureen's house, they would stick, like molehills on the vertical surface! Defying gravity! It seemed like magic! Intoxicated with our powers, we soon had a whole section of the lower back wall of the house pock-marked with lumps of sand. It was quite wonderful fun, and when the excitement wore off, we found our way back down the hill (all of eighty feet) to our own homes and thought nothing more of it. 

That was the prelude.

Later in the day — it must have been evening, because my father was home — Maureen’s father appeared at our back door, livid with rage, quivering with rage, and demanding to know the identity of the “delinquents” who had thrown sand on his house. In his rage, he was threatening to call the police and have the miscreants thrown in jail! Terrified, I screamed and sobbed repeated denials! Jail! Locked up away from my family! I knew that lying was wrong but  could not face the punishment threatened and the shame of being branded a criminal. 

All these decades later (and thinking of Mr. Rogers, too), I look back on that incident and am astonished by the lack of proportion and reason Maureen’s father exhibited. We were such tiny children, Jimmy and I, and we had not thrown paint, only sand. Water from a garden hose would wash it away! Police? Jail? Were these appropriate threats for a grownup to shout at a frightened little girl, his daughter’s playmate?

If anything, Jimmy and I had been guilty of poor judgment. Well, again, we were five and six years old! I don’t recall if “trespassing” was an issue. That would have been strange in our modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood of forty-foot lots, where we kids were always running from one yard to another and “cutting through” from one street to the next. The whole neighborhood was a "commons" for us then, as well as for unleashed dogs and outdoor cats.

What we had done was neither malicious nor irrevocable. We had had fun and made a mess, a mess that could be hosed away in minutes. Maureen’s father could have asked us to clean it up, but apparently he didn’t think of that. Only police and jail. 

So I lied. Now that was very wrong, and I knew it. I lied to my parents and I lied to this other suddenly threatening adult, and because I knew lying was wrong, I screamed and cried while persisting in my lie, both out of fear of discovery, for what had now been labeled a “crime” (the sand), and out of guilt for the lie.

After a while, after Maureen’s father finally left, my parents calmed me down and assured me that I would not go to jail, even if I had thrown the sand, but that I needed to tell them the truth. And so, tearfully, I did. 

That incident came back to me yesterday as, one by one, so many members of the House of Representatives lost control of their emotions and yelled and screamed in rage. At first I thought, they have to know [the truth], so why this  lack of self-control and dignity? That's when I remembered my six-year-old self, caught between lying and fear of punishment, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably. Oh, yes, I thought then. They know, all right. 

And Now, About That Five-Legged Dog

I’ll get to the dog in a minute, but first a couple of questions. How do you feel about living in a “post-truth era”? Are you convinced “there’s no such thing as facts”? 

Dan Rather – bless his heart! – has come out strongly on the side of facts and truth. Here are a few sample paragraphs for those disinclined to follow the link:

If people want to live in a post-truth world, where "elite" experts are all biased and facts are up for interpretation, I suggest they go all the way. 

You can go to a post-truth doctor who could say "well the elitist scientific tests say you have strep throat but I say it's cancer so let's give you some chemotherapy." 

Or you can go to a post-truth electrician who might say "well those elitist electrical manuals published in New York and those government regulations out of Washington say you should ground your electricity, but that's just a bunch of red tape." 

Or you can go to a post-truth auto mechanic who might say "well those elitist laws of physics say that this is how a braking system works, but let's replace your brake pads with fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies because they will smell better when you hit the brake pedal." If people want to live in a post-truth world, where "elite" experts are all biased and facts are up for interpretation, I suggest they go all the way. 

I was reminded of David Hume’s dizzying bout of temporary skepticism, brought on by pursuing justification down a rabbit hole. “How can I believe in the material world, when the senses sometimes deceive and there would be nothing illogical about nonexistence?” For Hume, dinner and conversation with friends, followed (or preceded) by a good game of billiards, sufficed to banish doubt. And as for the rest of us, outside of our own dizzying moments of metaphysical speculation, we have no choice, either, but to “believe in” the earth we stand on. We can no more doubt it while going about our lives than a fish can doubt the reality of water.

My father was no philosopher but an engineer. A “just the facts” kinda guy? Well, he also had a fanciful side that came out in a long-running serial bedtime story about a family of squirrels, and his inclined enough toward dreams that he encouraged me for years to enter the Kentucky Club tobacco contest to name a thoroughbred racehorse and win the horse. That is, he was enough of a story-teller and dreamer that, when I was a child, we shared common loves and interests.

On the other hand, he was a lifelong Republican and a proud army reserve officer, with very traditional conservative values, and our relationship grew strained during my adolescence. He was gung-ho the war in Vietnam and adamantly opposed to the E.R.A. So if he were still alive, where would he stand today?

I need to believe he would come down firmly on Dan Rather’s sturdy position, out of respect for the English language, as well as for facts. You see, in addition to classical music and serious poetry and opera, my father delighted in doggerel and shaggy dog stories and riddles, and one of his favorite riddles, sparking many riotous debates with small daughters, was this puzzler:

Q: If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have?

When we were little, my sisters and I readily fell for the trick question, eagerly shouting out “Five!” Then came the implacable, rock-ribbed parental lesson:

A: The dog has four legs. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg!

Long after my sisters and I had ceased to be gullible enough to offer the wrong answer, my father continued to trot out his old, tired riddle.

But here’s the thing: the answer never changes. The answer would not have changed even if my sisters and I had insisted for all those years that the tail was a leg and that the hypothetical dog in question had, therefore, five legs. We could have chanted in deafening chorus (Yeah, sure! As if my parents would have put up with that sort of nonsense!): “Five legs! Five legs! Five legs! Five legs!” It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

Repetition would not have made the wrong answer right then, and it doesn’t make it right today. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg. Repeating a lie as the truth does not make it true, no matter how many times you tell the lie, no matter how long and loudly you shout and chant and intoxicate yourself.

12/4/2016