Lettes to | the Editor
To the Editor:
The Oxford Dictionaries recently named their 2016 word of the year--“Post-truth: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” No wonder, after a campaign season that saw the winning candidate receive a rating from the major fact-checkers that 70 percent of what he said was false. Sometimes, he just repeated lies he saw or heard; other times he became the source of the falsehood, inventing things in the deep of night (maybe in his dreams) and tweeting them immediately. And he is still doing it, forcing his transition team to stop transitioning and try to explain him, ironically, using logic and words that have meaning, even while others of them take part in the fake news orgy.
Some say we should stop taking him literally – stop fussing about the words he uses, especially their vagueness (like “rigged” election, and “open up” the libel laws – what does that mean, exactly?), and whether they convey truth, or even anything discernable. But if we do that, then how do we take him? If he is never analyzed and questioned, then he sets the tone and the boundaries, having total control of both what he says and how it’s interpreted. That is not communication, it is propaganda. Given the fact that Trump’s driving motivations are a deep need to be adored, and yet also to be admired and feared as a “winner” (“killer” is the word his father used), and that these two impulses often conflict, how can we ever trust him to be truthful and consistent?
This raises a more disturbing question: Does the rise of fake news and Donald Trump indicate the fall of reason – the complete abdication by a significant portion of the populace of the basic civic duty in a civil society to wrestle with facts instead of giving in to primal fears and anger? If that is happening, how shall we live with each other? Where’s the common ground if we can’t agree on the basic facts in the world, and we have a leader that just doesn’t bend the truth, but obliterates it – who seems unable to distinguish fantasy from reality? What happens to our legal system, which, at least in its rules and procedures, attempts to elevate reason, facts, and truth to achieve justice? What happens to history, and even science, in such a world?
Steve Turman,
Red Oak