Truth Nor Consequences

There was a time, believe it or not, when consequences followed lies. Today I’m afraid we live in a country where liars imagine that the only consequence they’ll ever experience as a result of their untruth is ever greater success. Now, should there happen to be some fallout—they call that “trickledown”—from the inconsequential fables they spin around themselves . . . . Well! I guess it’s up to the little guy to sort that all out—or to take the blame, when that’s expedient.

And who exactly are the “little guys”? In the past, I used to think of you and me as the little guys—those of us who earn less than six figures and can barely scrape together two nickels to “save” each week. Now, I’m not so sure the little guys who’ll reap the gravest consequences of our continuously growing “productivity” and resulting eons of mega-consumption won’t be those of us who, literally, are little—namely, the children and grandchildren of the “boom” generation.

When did this national culture of lies without consequences get going? In one way, I suppose it’s as old as language itself. No word exists that isn’t “spin.” There’s a vortex of significance that swirls around any word and somewhere in the dark hole at the middle is the ding an sich. The thing that gives rise to the concept is, of course, not the concept itself. Thus, insubstantiality serves as the basis of all human thought, because that which causes the thought dissolves in the act of being thought about. Thereafter, it resides only in the hidden spot of thing-ness that has been totally obscured by the whorls of conceptualization which loop around it but are always being sucked back into it at the same time as the centripetal force tries to fling them away.

The fact that no word can actually stand in for the thing it represents is a reality we all cope with every minute of every day. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. And, it absolutely doesn’t mean we should take advantage of one another by never meaning anything we say. On the contrary, precisely because truth is so difficult to attain, we ought to spend most of our time silent in contemplation of the “Om” or the “Atman” or the “I am” that is the first of all words and the center of all that is. Do so, and some truth may occasionally creep into the few words you say.

By contrast, look at me now. Pouring words onto the page in the metastasis that speaking truth to untruth must unfortunately become. So, let’s loop back to my question of when America lost its way in the progress toward truth and justice, the concepts upon which this nation was founded. U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the springboard, Richard Nixon was the diver. With Watergate, Nixon plunged not just himself, but all of us, into the bottomless waters of lies without end. Yes, I imagine presidents before Nixon had not always told us the gods-honest truth, but none before Nixon disregarded it so utterly. And what was the consequence?

He lost his job and slinked back to San Clemente tail between his legs! One could hope the man never had another good night’s rest. But, he certainly didn’t suffer much in the way of public consequences. Ford pardoned him a month after he resigned. Not because Nixon wasn’t guilty but, Ford says, because “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored . . . could be irreparably lost by the prospects of . . . prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing [the former President] to further punishment and degradation.” I guess it’s a good thing the founding fathers didn’t have these same qualms about prolonged and divisive debate with King George, huh?

Had the nation taken the Nixon occasion to debate and determine exactly what “separation of powers” and presidential “executive privilege” the Constitution intends, perhaps we would not be where we are today. Instead, Nixon’s bald-faced lies without consequences gave way to the charmingly masked lies of the former actor Ronald Reagan in his trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the wealthy and, most notoriously, the Iran-Contra Affair. Rather than tasking him with negative consequences for any of these travesties, the country honored Reagan with a state funeral upon his death in 2004. And, now, for the last eight years we’ve been treated to the shameless, self-indulgent pseudo-buffoonery of the younger Bush and his administration. Virtually every word from their mouths is another fear-mongering lie, and never any consequences. They’re happy to bring to justice the little guys like those they accused of offenses at Abu Ghraib, but who's going to be held responsible for the grave abuses at Guatanamo.

And what will be their legacy? Never-ending "War on Terror." National debt of inconceivable proportion. Millions without health care. Hundreds of thousands without jobs. More and more mortgage foreclosures. Grievously wounded veterans who have no long-term health care. Nothing done to slow climate change. Nothing done to improve public education. Nothing done to achieve energy independence. Failure in the financial sector. . . . But “victory” in Iraq! (Don’t think about Afghanistan. Don’t! I said.) And CEO’s with salaries that diverge from their workers’ pay by multiple hundreds of times! That’s the sort of world I hoped my child would inherit. . . . Or, no, I guess it isn't. For just a moment there, I must have dreamed I was a CEO.
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