© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “When in
doubt tell the truth.” Mark Twain
What are the three hardest words to
say? Some think it is “I don’t know.” Many people say that. Others think it is
“I was mistaken” which isn’t heard often. The three hardest words to say are “I
deliberately lied.”
Yet it happens all of the time. We’re
inundated in this “I deliberately lied” society where making up stuff is valued
more than telling the truth. Example: this presidential campaign.
Today’s conventional wisdom is that everyone
should lie “if we really care about our country.” They say, “I have to lie
about this candidate I oppose because the opposition is lying about my
candidate.”
Candidates do not care if they have
already been recorded saying the opposite of what they’re now saying. When questioned
they proclaim, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Worse, with all of the data
available to citizens today it is amazing that the truth suffers more in
today’s world than in past societies. As a lifelong historian I have studied
most of the history of our country but I do not recognize statements currently being
made about the founding and development of America.
Example: In February 2015, President
Obama said, “Here in America Islam has been woven into the fabric of our
country since its founding.”
That is certainly not true. A more
truthful statement would be that people from many lands wove the fabric of our
country during the last couple hundred years. No one nation or region,
certainly no one religion has dominated the founding of our country. However, America
has been served well by Protestant, Catholic and Jewish citizens.
People today confuse opinion from
theory from truth. In fact, it seems opinion is the new truth. If I say, “The
Sun rises in the East.” I am told, “That is just your opinion since you belong
to the other political party.”
The great divider of our society are
two dominant political organizations: Democrats and Republicans. Both groups
view truth as only from their perspective. What one candidate is reported to
have said is more an exercise in seeing the bias of reporters than seeing the
truth.
A real truth bomb is the recent “birther”
controversy. It is contained in the question: was President Obama born in
Hawaii? The media acts like it is a one-sided issue where Republicans are
acting in very inappropriate ways.
But the research is quick and easy.
However, it doesn’t fit the political agenda so it is ignored. The birther
question came into being not by Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
Rather it started as a promotional
booklet produced by then Literary Agency Acton
& Dystel celebrating the authors they at that time were representing on
the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of their company.
On one of the thirty-six pages is
this statement: Barack Obama, the first
African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and
raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a
Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a
financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.
The next page had a description of
Ralph Nadar and the 1990s boy-band, New
Kids On the Block.
That’s where the “birther” story
started. We know that some members of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign gave this
information to the media. Mainstream Republicans repeated it then and in the
eight years of Obama’s presidency.
Did Donald Trump start this? No, but
he could have researched it and then not repeated it. Truth has no place in the
“birther” controversy since it serves the partisans on both sides. It is great
for fundraising.
An old joke is: how can you tell if a
politician is lying? When their lips are moving. Today: how can you tell if the
media is lying? Nowadays, they will always lie - so expect it and embrace truth.
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