The Truth about Lying.....

 

    In the innocent world that I grew-up in, lying was considered a 'bad' thing.  If you lied, then you were being a wrong-headed deceiver of others....and, you were, in general terms, a 'bad person'.  The lead-in to the Superman show on our tiny, black and white t-v's even celebrated, "...Truth, Justice and the American Way."....along with the super-dude being, "....faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."  It was broadly held that 'liars' were sub-standard, indecent and undesirable people.  It was a serious insult to call someone a 'liar'.  

  My how things change, eh.  In the present, it now happens that lying is just something people do to get what they want....money and power, almost always.  Right?  If 'the Truth' truly is 'inconvenient' then you simply suppress it with a barrage of lies.  Once you begin doing this, you have jumped out onto a very icy slope and you are headed down a path from which return is rare, if not impossible. Once a person has managed to subdue, even to slay, their conscience, the way back becomes unclear and murky. Most who decide--either by default, or with real intent--to be dishonest people, have made a decision and will stand behind it to the end.  We are watching this manifest on a massive scale across the land:  people are choosing to believe the Idiot's 'Big Lie', and in many cases they even know it's bogus...but, they will fly that 'Trump 2020' banner on their lawn regardless.  And, they hope he'll run again and this time they won't be so incompetent about stealing the election.  They will just do it and let the devil take the hindmost....and he will.

  When Kellyanne Conway stood in front of television cameras outside the White House and took a deep-ish breath before speaking, it was her feeble and dying conscience's last breath.  The next words out of her mouth have become a permanent part of her legacy and will follow her to the end of the trail.  She put forward the idea that there are such things as, "...alternate facts".   It was a truly gob-smacking moment.  She stood before the entire world--in effect--and said, essentially, that facts are elusive.  You can have this piece of  information, and it can be 'true'.....or, maybe not.  There exist--according to Kellyanne--no real means of establishing that one 'fact' is 'true' while another is 'false'.  It's all a great big ol' swamp and it's not even clear if it's full of alligators.  One supposes that we'll have to drain it if we want to find that out.

  As I have mentioned previously on this venue, we now live, move and breathe in a 'post fact' world. Just because you say something is not true...or true, for that matter....doesn't mean it is so.  You have your facts and I have mine, and, the fact that they don't agree no longer means that one of them is 'false' and the other is 'true'.  No, no....   Now, I can have my own made-up factual reality, and you can have yours.  Except, of course, for the fact that I will relentlessly attack your version and promote my own, until yours is impugned and mine is widely accepted.  Then I will have the upper hand and you will be the loser.

  Hey, this is the basis for the entire argument being jammed down viewers throats by the far-right....which, by the way, is no longer so far out on the right wing spectrum of possibilities.  In fact, the so-called 'far right' is now squatting firmly in the middle of everything conservatives want you to believe and will lie, cheat and steal to obtain. The lying has become so pervasive and outrageous that the Orange Idiot could stand in front of a rally in Georgia last weekend and go on and on about how the farcical re-count in Arizona had proven the election was stolen from him....when it was public knowledge that this is a very big, fat lie.  The genuine FACTS of the situation are that it proved he lost by an even larger margin than originally stated.  He has zero restraint and is seemingly confident that he can lie his ass off and his sycophants will believe him.

  AND THEY DO.

Write him off at your peril.  This man is the greatest
danger to Democracy and America that we have
ever had.

    This might not matter in a world where such despicable behavior is simply understood as an inferior and terrified mental case doing what he's always done.  I mean, who cares, right?

  Well, we might tell ourselves that such blatant, dishonest, and dishonorable behavior is just more of the same.  But, the fact is, he is doing grave damage to our republic.  If you look at what happened on January 6th, at some point, you have to realize that this was not just a bunch of mal-contents who cannot accept that their asshole-idiot lost the Oval Office....but, that these people conducted a violent assault on the rule of law, on democratic principles, on LIFE as we know it, on the government itself and thereby ON ALL OF US.

  The Idiot and his cronies....a whole lot of them, many of them just as willing to lie, cheat and steal like he is....are a growing and dangerous threat to the American way of life.  If we allow ourselves to remain at all passive in the face of this dire threat, we will be living in a third-world style banana republic before we can even understand that it has happened.  The forces for this are gathering themselves, making bogus laws in state legislatures that will render the idea of open, fair, and honest elections to the dustbins of history.  

   As I have, along with many others, said so frequently, this democracy will disappear overnight and we will have something painfully in common with the people of Germany, i.e. we will have watched in disbelief as it all happened.  And, our means of fighting back, of resisting, will be beyond reach for most Americans.  It will be a 'done deal' and we'll be standing here asking ourselves, "What the fuck happened?"

Nobody is using the term: diaspora....but, that is what is happening

 

    The dictionary defines 'diaspora' in multiple ways, but the one meaning that seems appropriate at present is 'displacement' and it is here and happening now.

   As the climate continues it shift towards becoming more and more deadly, we are seeing it happen almost as if we were standing on a street corner and watching as cars and trucks slam into each other creating a giant pile-up.  The storms are becoming more frequent and more violent and massively destructive.  The wild fires in the west are simply out of control.  The drought that may culminate in some very scary crop failures is happening in various parts of the country.  I just saw a news item on how low the reservoirs in northern California are......i.e. never been this bad. And, we haven't even mentioned the pandemic that continues to ravage the planet.  

   It was announced just yesterday that we have surpassed the death toll exacted by the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.  So, we're at almost 700,000 and counting.  We blew by the death tolls of every war America has participated in, and I noted that when we passed the World War II toll of 405,000. 

  The simple truth is that larger and larger areas of the planet are rapidly becoming uninhabitable.  There is no longer any ability to sustain life in these regions....no water, no crops.  Disease and despotic leaders have come to the fore and it's going to get a whole lot worse before it even shows the possibility of improving.  These people from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and on and on...did not walk out of their humble dwellings to begin a foot journey of incredible danger and difficulty on a whim.  They did so because they have lost any hope that they would survive if they remained where they were.  It was clear to them that they had no future where their families have lived for many generations.

  So, the inevitable result of this tsunami of hopelessness.....is a diaspora.  It won't stop anytime soon, because these poor souls are between a rock and a hard place, i.e. stay and die, or go and perhaps die anyway.  But, most of them still have the courage and the stamina to cling to HOPE. On the outside chance that they will survive the journey, the crime and hunger, the exposure to the elements...and even endure being whipped with the reins of an officer's horse, as he tries to force them back away from crossing the border. (You may have seen this happen just a few days ago.)  These people still carry on.  Nobody who has an ounce of human compassion can watch footage of this crisis and remain dry-eyed.

  It's far too easy to conjecture that they just envy America and Americans and want what we have.  How dare they?  What they want so desperately is to have a life with some even slight hope for a future.  Can you even imagine what it would be like to be in their situation?  How does one lift their head on awakening each morning and face a day like they do?  At present, the souls huddled under the bridge in Del Rio Texas, are enduring furnace-like heat, privations of every kind, watching their children die from very preventable causes and knowing that the next thing that happens could well be being sent back to the hell that they gambled with their lives to escape.

   And, a whole lot of Americans just fear these people, are willing to stuff them right back where they came from because of the imagined threat they pose to our way of life. 

  Once again, we are at a moral crossroads: either we can treat these people with kindness and compassion and do what we can to ease what they are and have gone through.......or we can just play hardball and tell ourselves that it's their tough luck to be them.  Ayn Rand would be delighted with that option, eh.  SUCKS TO BE YOU.

I am still not ready to believe that is who we really are....as a nation or as people. 

  But, I am starting to slide in that direction........................

Hell comes in many forms....

Intent to commit harm......

 

   In society at large, if a person does something that is clearly and pre-meditatively intended to cause harm to others, even animals, that person can be held to account for their actions.  If it can be demonstrated in a court of law that this perpetrator had the worst of intentions, they can receive a significant jail sentence, depending on how much harm was inflicted.

  So, why is it, then, that the people with access to millions of viewers and listeners are not held to the same standard?  I suppose there are all sorts of legal nuances that come into play, including the right to exercise free speech as per the First Amendment.  But, it seems clear that we are sitting on our hands as nasty people like Tucker Carlson spew all kinds of anti-vax misinformation.  And, it's not a difficult task to find specific individual cases where someone has listened to these idiots, refused to wear a mask or get vaccinated.....and caught Covid and ultimately died.  Just yesterday, I read of a bride who caught Covid and died after listening to misinformation.  And, there is a steady drum-beat of stories that echo this same sequence of events.  Naive person hears someone on television, thinks to themselves: "Jeezum, he (or she) must know what they're talking about, right?  I mean, they're on TV.......right?"  Sadly this is becoming so common that one hardly notices as it pops up again and again.

  This is a clear-cut case of the 'pundit' spreading misinformation which is believed by people who are apparently too helpless to do their own research and instead choose to take the deadly advice of an asshole like Tucker Carlson.  He pretends to have their best interests in mind and he's full of advice to anybody foolish enough to listen to a word he says.  But, ol' Tuck has a different agenda in mind than what his followers imagine he has.  He is recruiting for the far-right.  His on-air spiels are laced with innuendo and not at all subtle connections to White Supremacy, and, lately, he's getting very fascist in his leanings, even more so than in previous years. Several liberal pundits have come right out and called Tucker a Nazi.  And, if what is meant by that is that he's a devoted white supremacist who is willing to use any and all manner of subterfuges to stall the progress of diversity in America....then, yes, he's a NAZI.  In fact, Josef Goebbles would be proud of how Tucker Carlson lies so profusely and with such hubris and self-righteous piety.

  For reasons only his feverish brain can comprehend, Tucker Carlson is one of those people who believes that having a strong, authoritarian leader and government is the best path forward for America.  It's not difficult to imagine why he feels that way.

  Allow me to take a stab at this:  Tucker, like so many of his listeners, is terrified that America is becoming a different country than the one that has been ruled by old white men since its inception.  The handwriting is on the wall, and it's saying that the Brown Wave is coming.  So, get your guns ready, be prepared to lie, cheat and steal if you must, because anything that is necessary to push this immense change back to where it came from is what you will need to do.  

  It seems almost too obvious to mention--again--but, a significant portion of red-state America is moving towards acceptance of the idea that legal and honest elections are no longer viable.  They will simply allow the people of color and ethnicity who are rocking the boat to gain the upper hand.....and, that--for red-neck America is unacceptable.   

  So, if lying, gerrymandering, court-packing, bogus laws that allow state legislators to overturn election results because they 'disagree' with them, are what is called for then so be it.  They are not hindered by any apparent input from their individual or collective consciences.  Honesty is cast aside like a red-headed step-child and we're off to the races...on our way to creating a full-blown autocracy.  Yes, a dictatorship.

  And, guess who wants to run that abomination.  Why, yes, it's the mentally ill idiot in Florida who thinks he's master of all and God's gift to America.  

  However, it's not a given that he'll even be able to run.  He's pretty sure that he controls the entire GOP now and can launch an assault against any politician who is foolish enough to challenge his supremacy.

But, there is also a tsunami of legal problems that is bearing down on his little beach at Mar-a-Lago.  He's got some serious legal minds who have him in their sights and they apparently are stock-piling some potent ammunition while they plan how to indict and prosecute him.....for a whole slew of things, everything from taxes and stealing to trampling sundry laws and rules....not to mention his lying to the American people almost every time he opens his ugly little hooter. 

Nightmares do come true after all, eh.