How did truth get so tricky?
These days I often find myself wondering how parents explain the current injustices of the world to their children. When I was waking up to the world, I sorely tried my parents’ patience with questions about Hitler, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and why it was the accepted norm that every girl should marry and have kids.
I remember my mother becoming exasperated at the barrage of questions and replying: ‘‘Well Jane, when you grow up you’ll soon find out that the world isn’t a fair place and you’ll just have to learn to live with it.’’
It seemed a cop-out to a child whose constant cry after internecine disputes with her siblings was: ‘‘But that’s so unfair!’’
As one grew older, the depressing advice given was to know when to pick your battles and to savour your victories because they would be few and far between. Much later, when that old maxim wore thin, I became familiar with the post-modern concept of sucking it up, because life sucked and you’d better harden up.
When I morphed into a callow youthette, I fell into a comfort zone of cynicism and scepticism toward the world. Armed with a background soundtrack of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell songs, I embraced their deep world-weariness and took comfort from their sad poetic wisdom.
Back then you could drop out of university and pick up a job the same day, and if you didn’t like that, leave and get another job the next day.
No, there wasn’t much sucking it up to do, because life was your oyster and Piggy Muldoon was about the only monster you had to contend with. You got to take your rage out against him in the anti-apartheid Springbok Tour protests, and felt proud you were doing your bit when those protests received worldwide coverage.
Looking back, it seems so innocent and straightforward compared to living in the chicanery of now – the dirty politics, the fake news, the real news dismissed as fake, and the undermining of the Fourth Estate by armies of social media trolls free to spread their unmitigated muck.
How do you explain the ever-changing lies that come out of Camp Trump to a child to whom the notions of truth and justice are allimportant?
Even White House Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders can’t roll out her usual airy dismissals of Trump’s outrages and has failed to address the current confusion Trump’s legal adviser, Rudy Giuliani, has added to the alleged repayment made to Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, regarding porn star Stormy Daniels.
Keeping track of the narrative of who paid what to whom, and whether it was a campaign contribution or was it from Trump’s own pocket when he previously said he had never given Daniels a dime, is calculated chaos designed to exhaust the most dedicated sleuth.
And so on it goes, all statements unable to be reconciled, with even the great apologist, Huckabee Sanders, who can speak fluent Trumpese, confessing that it’s all terribly complicated.
Now Trump’s long-time physician, Harold Bornstein, has admitted that the president’s glowing bill of health awarded him during the campaign was a complete work of fiction. To top it off, the mad, bad and sad idea that Trump should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is actually being considered in some quarters.
How indeed do you bring up baby in a factoid free-for-all when there is no correction, and truth and values are but a remote poetic possibility? Where’s the real Cohen when we need him to sing us back to sanity?