Try telling the truth
Oh, truth. What in the world has become of you? For many generations, truth was central to the American political psyche, deeply ingrained in the public’s perception of the U.S. presidency by the charming, but untrue, tale of a young George Washington declaring that he could not tell a lie about the cause of a cherry tree’s hatchet-driven demise.
Honesty, back then, wasn’t just a bestpolicy practice as described by founding father Benjamin Franklin; it was a character trait that was admirable in every American and essential in any person seeking to become the fledgling republic’s leader.
Even if the cherry-tree confession turned out to be a wispy bit of mythmaking by Washington biographer Mason Locke Weems, the sentiment it conveyed — that honesty and truth and integrity matter in public life — was central to most Americans’ idea of America.
What a long, strange journey it has been for truth, which has been reduced to a quaint notion rather than a desirable practical reality. As our neighbours to the south prepare to inaugurate their 45th president, America has become a nation in which truth is for chumps.
Falsehood, more often than not masquerading as fact, became the intellectual currency of this, the United States’ most toxic political season. The rise of fake-news stories and websites as shapers of opinion and deciders of ballot-box choices was as undeniable as it was ruthlessly effective.
The 18th-century adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes was coined in an era when circumnavigating the globe took a whole lot longer than a mouse click or a re-tweet, but the enduring wisdom of its insight is reinforced by the resounding manner in which misinformation triumphed in this rancorous digital-age election.
So essential to the outcome of the U.S. presidential race was un-truth, in fact, that one of its most aggressive purveyors — Steve Bannon, erstwhile chief executive at noxious fiction-peddling Breitbart News and more recently CEO of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign — is about to be installed in the White House as chief adviser to the new president.
There’s even a cutesy colloquial name for the era in which America has arrived: “post-truth.” In the age of social media and shady fake-news websites, what is true has become far less important than what a margin-ofvictory segment of the public can be made to believe is true.
As one Trump apologist so clumsily — but sincerely — stated in a recent postelection TV interview, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.”
On the chillier side of the Canada/U.S. border, truth still holds some sway in the political arena. We do, after all, have a prime minister who, under duress, will reluctantly fess up to the fact his party’s big-ticket fundraisers really are cash-for-access affairs.
But in Canada, too, truth, it seems, has become a last-resort political fallback, a tool to be employed only very reluctantly when misdirection and deflection and partisan prevarication and flat-out fabrication have failed.
It’s sad, but — unlike far too many things presented as fact these days — it’s true.