We need to discuss our national virtue

I’m one of those people who watched the White House correspondents’ dinner. I found the hired entertainer occasionally funny and at other intervals, gratuitously vulgar.

It’s important to remember, though, that what she did was an act. When the president curses and mocks political adversaries and private citizens, when he equates opposing him with treason, when he uses the power of his office to punish critics, it’s not an act. It’s real.

I don’t know whether a smoky eye is good or bad in the makeup world, and I don’t want Kellyanne Conway to be trapped under a tree. The fact is, though, that the comedian was telling the truth. Others peddle daily lies to the American people; when you market deceit as “alternative facts,” you do real and lasting damage to the truth and the country.

When you’re the president of the United States, and you wave your finger menacingly at reporters, and repeatedly brand them evil and “enemies of the people,” you’re not making a joke. You’re making a threat.

I know there are Americans who support the president, who love their country, and who think his policies are sound. I don’t want to debate those points here. I also don’t want to talk about Stormy Daniels. I think President Clinton should have said his relations with Monica Lewinsky were a matter between his wife and himself. I think the same about President Trump’s infidelities.

I’m troubled, though, that President Trump’s tactics in dealing with his affairs reflect the abuse of power and unblushing deceit he’s long brought to any obstacle, problem or person that stands in his way. It’s that chronic deceit and narcissistic turpitude that I want to discuss here.

It’s times like these, when he denies saying what he said, challenges us to “go back” and “take a look at what [he] said,” and then deflects our attention to the “witch hunt.”

Well, Mr. President, I went back and checked what you said. It isn’t a witch hunt just because someone caught you in a lie. Again.

I realize some of you don’t agree that the president lies. I’m not trying to convince you otherwise. Ijust ask you to listen more closely to what he says.

I’m talking here to those of you who know the president lies, who are offended by lying, who cringe at the corruption, but who have made the decision to overlook his self-interested lies for the sake of his party’s agenda and position on issues with which you agree.

I understand why issues are important. I also recognize that politicians, like the rest of us, sometimes lie. I contend, though, that this president’s lies are different from most people’s lies in kind and extent, and that prudence, justice, and arguably the preservation of our liberty require that we set our political agendas aside for this moment, just as we’ve done in times of war.

I’m not here equating President Trump with Hitler.

It’s Hitler’s theory of the “big lie” that I have on my mind. Hitler wrote that big lies have “the force of credibility,” that people “more readily fall victim to big lies than the small lie” because, while we sometimes tell “small lies in little matters,” most of us “would be ashamed to resort to large scale falsehoods.” Since “it would never come into [our] heads to fabricate colossal untruths,” we can’t believe anyone else would “distort the truth so infamously.”

Hitler also notes that even after a gross lie has been proven to be a lie, “it always leaves traces behind it” so its influence never entirely goes away. He concludes by disclosing that all this “is known to all expert liars in this world.”

It’s significant, given the president’s constant charges of “fake news,” that Hitler wasn’t crowing about his own talent for lying. He was instead accusing his political enemies of telling the big lies, an instructive irony when he himself was the biggest liar of them all.

As for our interest in seeing our ideas enacted into law, our first president bequeathed to us his priorities. President Washington counseled that we should above all “observe good faith and justice” in our dealings with the world. He acknowledged that acting justly and virtuously would sometimes lose for us a “temporary advantage,” but that the nation would be richly repaid in the long term for doing what’s right. He hoped we’d be an example to the world of “a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” He believed a nation’s “permanent felicity,” well-being and greatness depended on its “virtue.”

He further warned that “all obstructions to the execution of the laws” are “destructive” of Constitutional government and “of fatal tendency.”

Fatal.

That’s a strong word. We can’t survive the normalization of lying. In our present extremity, we need to set aside our left and right policy preferences and suspend the spirit of party so we can together preserve, protect and defend our fundamental morality.

If President Washington saw such crucial value in our national virtue, maybe we should, too. Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.