The long, slow death of truth
IAM writing these words on the veranda of the Park Beach Cafe across the road from Park Beach just round the corner from Dodge City on the glorious southern beaches.
Declan, the resident barista, has just made me the best coffee east of the bridge.
It is cloudy, but when the sun briefly shows itself Frederick Henry Bay has touches of turquoise inshore and indigo out beyond the breakers.
Yes, I know it isn’t quite Byron Bay and may it never be.
Despite climate change, our weather still saves us from the curse of what is known around theworldas“over-tourism’’.
Beyond the bay the open sea stretches untrammelled all the way to the ice. Little wonder the temperature here often struggles to keep pace with our seasonal expectations.
But the locals like it just the way it is. They constantly tell me to shut up about the place. My wife Donna is in local real estate, but she too has reservations about my advocacy. Apparently, my lifetime in journalism far from guarantees any dividend for her from our connection. And because my opinions are not always hers, she sometimes thinks about reverting to her unmarried name.
Looking out across the bay, even after a long lockdown I am still struck by the absence of aircraft tracking into Hobart airport. I’ve just spotted a rare out bound plane, reminding me of my countless flights to Sydney or Melbourne and then on eastwards chasing the dawn across the Pacific to the USA.
Early mornings flying out of Hobart I would look down to spot my mate Mark Duncan (akaMrFl at head) heading out in his boat with fishing clients. Orwithoutthem.
Like so many fishing guides I know, when he’ s not working Markgoesfishing.
He might even have looked up at my ascending plane and felt a pang of wanderlust for faraway places, while I looked down feeling a pang of “comfortlust’’ for the familiar.
Over a lifetime I have developed enough antibodies for travel that I am now immune to that particular disease.
Still, I would have loved to have been in America this week.
No matter how the numbers eventually stack up in the United States Congress,
Trump’s legacy in American politics will live on long after him. He has changed our world, or at least our perception of truth and reality as we knewit.
Everywhere Trump makes people in democracies uneasy because, as the election result showed, almost half the people cannot detect a lie or, even worse, don’ t care about it.
In the past America has profoundly shaped our lives. Under Trump we have worried that their present is our future.
Duplicity was once unacceptable in American public life.
Nixon resigned over it. Clinton lied to a congressional inquiry and went well down the road to impeachment.
But Trump has shown how easy it is to dissemble in political life.
How to deny and deny and deny.
How to say dreadful things about women, how to insult the nation’s war dead, how to make up the truth as he goes along and, if caught out, how callit,“FakeNews.”
Trump, who held a victory celebration the night of the election he didn’t win, is the master of the lie, but he is not the source of the problem. His narcissism and self-delusion makes him the best exemplar in the Western world, but the truth is that dishonesty in politics infects the whole world.
Even in our remote island at the end of the world, a government minister was accused of misleading Parliament and there were no ramifications.
Taxpayers’ money is handed out to selected businesses as hardship relief, but the details are kept secret from the public.
Secrecy might be seen as just a lie that has not yet been told.
Indeed, it is a Machiavellian political truth that secrecy removes the need to lie to the people. Perhaps for that we shouldbegrateful.
Trump might be the worst, but he is not alone in the world.
We always knew that the bad guys in international politics were shameless liars. Totalitarian regimes never have a problem with the truth; fascist and communist leaders, military dictators and theocratic fundamentalist despots simply invent their own truths.
They tell their people there was no massacre, there are no concentration camps, and the virus didn’ t origin ate here. And their people blindly accept.
And if the Australian government says differently, we will just have to eat our own crayfish and drink our own wine.
But in the so-called “free world’’ we like to believe we are immune from the misbehaviours of less happy lands.
We have inalienable rights, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press to safeguard us from the worst political disinformation.
The persecution of Julian Assange should have long ago challenged that assumption.
The lie about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) took us from invading Iraq into decades of disastrous and unwinnable war.
We were slow learners. But in the end, we realised Saddam had no nuclear bombs. He just talked as if he did because, of course, he was an inveterate liar. But then long before Trump, so were other world leaders.
At the time the awful truth became apparent, on 60 Minutes I asked John Howard, “Prime Minister I thought the Coalition was right going into Iraq because you led me to believe Saddam hadWMDs.
“I believed you then. So, tell me now why I shouldn’t I feel likeamug?”
Howard replied with disarminghonesty.
“Charles, you shouldn’t feel like a mug because at the time I believed it too.”
The best interpretation I could put on this was that our PM was an honest man who had been misled by George BushandTonyBlair.
I knew John Howard from many sit-down interviews and on the road election campaign sand I was inclined to believe him.
And had I known Blair and Bush half as well, I might have given them the benefit of the doubt that they too had been misled.
But then you start wondering, even in the free world, in the modern deep state, how far do the lies extend? And who can you really believe?
The invasion of Iraq begat the worst of unwinnable wars. It saw our troops, alongside Americans, bogged down in Afghanistan, which Trump (for once correctly) has called a “shit hole not worth fighting for”.
I have been to a few places fitting that description, but Afghanistan would be at the top of my list. Still, when I was there, I felt constrained to support our troops. After all, in the words of Tennyson’ s Charge of the Light Brigade, how could they know, “Someone had blundered?”
Blundered or lied. What’s thedifference?
These are dark thoughts for an increasingly bright morning at Park Beach. The clouds have cleared. The sun is shining.
Some surfers in black wetsuits are now out and waiting for a wave. Riding the growing swell, they look a bit like tasty seals, but hopefully the water is toocoldforashark.
As the day brightens the news from America becomes increasingly heartening. Biden might yet catch his wave.
He’s an old bloke, but if he can get up on his board then, for the good of his country and ours, his best years might yet beinfrontofhim.
Let’shopeso.
TRUMP’S NARCISSISM AND SELF-DELUSION MAKE HIM THE BEST EXEMPLAR IN THE WESTERN WORLD, BUT THE TRUTH IS THAT DISHONESTY IN POLITICS INFECTS THE WHOLE WORLD.