You can sell anything
“Caveat emptor” is a Latin phrase which roughly translates as “let the buyer beware.” Historically it has, for the most part, been used in reference to the purchase of illicit sex, illegal drugs, shady stocks, and of course the proverbial Foreign Prince email scam.
There seems to be no shortage of victims for these sorts of these shell games. No matter the red flags, media warnings, or common sense, it seems there will always be a cohort of overweight, under intelligent men willing to believe that some stripper really likes them.
The sad truth is, people will believe the lies they like before they will believe the truths they find uncomfortable, or the truths which offend their most dearly held hatreds. Even if they know it is the truth. Here lately, it seems that the pimps, meth cooks, and sleazy stockbrokers have forsaken their former vocations for the world of politics.
It is a sensible career change of course, considering that hookers have to give up something very personal to earn their pay, and meth cooks risk considerable time in jail if caught. Politicians on the other hand, need only to peddle cheap “culture war” platitudes and prejudicial slogans to induce the same cohort to give them “money for nothing, and chicks for free” to quote an old rock and roll song. And it only seems to get worse every election cycle.
Truth be told, the amount of money being raised by these dealers in psychological meth is enough to make Pablo Escobar green with envy. And the politicians risk nothing, even if real people die due to their incendiary rhetoric, they face no accountability, unless one considers the implications of selling one’s soul to Satan, but then most of these people do not truly believe in God or the devil, despite what they tell the ignorant fools who pay for their custom tailored suits and diamond encrusted watches (The definition of “Ignorant Fool” in this case is anyone who pays someone else to tell them what to think).
Criticism and condemnation of drug dealers and other purveyors of vice and degradation are never hard to find. Preachers and pundits alike decry the breakdown of public morals and virtue, often while financing the very vices they criticize. And the true cause is conveniently ignored because it is uncomfortable.
Purveyors of vice, whether they be drug dealers, pimps, or politicians do not exist in a vacuum. They exist because there is a market for what they sell. No matter the laws or penalties if caught, there is still an ample supply of smugglers ready to bring tons contraband across the border because there is a market for the product, just as there are meth cooks in trailer parks here and there because there is a market for the product. Pimps engage in human trafficking and other disgusting crimes because there is a market for the product. And politicians tell lies because there is a market for their lies.
If we truly want to improve our society all we have to do is stop buying the product. If we stop buying dope, dope dealers will stop selling it. If we want to stop illegal immigration, we should do something about the corporations who hire illegal workers. If we want politicians to stop lying and start leading, we should stop paying them to lie.
It would be better for everybody. Politicians lie to us because we pay them to do so. They tell us the lies that appeal to our prejudices and our hatreds. They tell us the lies that give us a rush. Just as drug dealers sell the drugs which are popular in the market, what the public will pay them for, politicians are cut from the same cloth, they tell us the lies we pay them to tell us. We know they are lying but we pay them anyway because they tell us the lies we want to hear. This is not something we should take lightly, the lesson of Hitler and the hell he put Germany through provides us with a glaring example of what can happen when the people buy too many of a politician’s lies.
There is much hand-wringing in various quarters regarding the degradation of political discourse these days. fortunately, this is a problem with an easy solution, all we have to do is stop buying the lies. If we stop buying their lies, the politicians will stop telling them.
Politicians and hookers are similar, neither opens their mouth for free.
Fulton Arrington is a past president and current board member of the Friends of the New Echota State Historic Site. He can be reached by email at fultonlarrington@
yahoo.com.