To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  ‘And then along comes some wonk from MIT or the Wall Street Journal or the Economist who tells the guy in Wisconsin that he’s wrong. That, actually, the facts say globalization is good for the economy, because it’s making everybody richer. Or that, actually, GDP has increased by 2.2 per cent in the last fiscal year. That’s what the facts say. “I’m merely citing the evidence”,’ McNamara added in his best hoity-toity accent, as he walked around on tiptoes, like a prissy ballerina. ‘ “I’m merely following the data.” ’

  ‘Or immigration. I lose my job to some spic who’s happy to work for half what I used to get, and then you tell me that immigration is a net boost to the economy. That overall we gain more than we lose. So I should be happy. Because “those are the facts”. And you know what I say, if I’m that guy in Wisconsin? I say, fuck that. FUCK THAT, Maggie.’

  She hoped he hadn’t seen her jump when he shouted.

  ‘You see, what if I don’t like those facts? Huh? What if I think those facts have nothing to do with me or how I feel? What if I want some “alternative facts” that say something about my life? What, Maggie, if I’m sick of your crowd ending every argument by pulling out your killer so-called facts? Don’t you think it would feel real good to stop you doing that, once and for all? And do you know how I stop you? Because there’s only one way. I need to destroy all your facts.’

  ‘They’re not my facts, Mac. They’re the facts. They’re not on anyone’s side.’

  ‘Really? Because it sure don’t feel that way to our folks. If what you just said was right then sometimes the facts would break their way, sometimes they’d break for the other side. Like a ref in a ballgame. But it’s not like that, is it? The facts always break your way. My guy in Wisconsin sees a murderer, he wants to fry him in the electric chair. “That’ll teach those motherfuckers once and for all,” he says. And then some professor gets on her hind legs and says, “Actually, all the evidence suggests that countries with the death penalty have higher murder rates than countries that don’t.” Ah, come on. Don’t give me that.

  ‘You got bad guys shooting people. Give me a gun, then I can protect my family. That’ll make us safer. And then, here we go, the pointy-heads and the know-it-alls at the New York Times or NPR pipe up, “Actually,” ’ – he was on tiptoes again – ‘ “there are more gun deaths in America than in all these one hundred and sixty-four countries that ban guns put together.” No way, that can’t be. Don’t tell me that.

  ‘D’you see what I’m saying to you, Maggie? It’s tiring when the elite keep saying you’re wrong every hour of every day. Two men fucking each other in the ass, that’s just unnatural. “Actually, there are same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom.” Actually, actually, always fucking “actually”.

  ‘But what if we just stopped you from doing that? What if we took “actually” right off the table? Let me put it in terms your crowd might understand. Scrabble. I bet you love Scrabble. Am I right?’

  As it happened, Maggie had never had the patience for it. Liz was the master, her brain computing all the possibilities in seconds. Maggie never quite saw the point. But she nodded, knowing there was no stopping Mac now.

  ‘So imagine you’re playing Scrabble against this guy who keeps dipping his hand in that bag of letters, keeps on pulling out an X or a Q or a Z. Pretty soon, you get sick of it. You get tired. So you take the goddamn bag and chuck it right out of the window. See how he likes that. See how well he plays now. That’s tempting, right?

  ‘You take away all the knowledge and history and facts and science that the elite love using to keep the little guy down. You just take it away. Level the playing field.’

  He sat down and drained his glass. His face was becoming flushed.

  ‘So that’s what this is about?’ Maggie said in the pause. ‘Torch the libraries, then when everyone knows nothing, we’ll all be equal.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Don’t try pretending I’m some kind of communist or something.’

  ‘All right: everyone will be equally ignorant.’

  ‘I’m talking about robbing the elite of their weapons, the ones they use to keep the rest of us down. But no. That’s not what this is all about.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’

  ‘People want a story, Maggie. They want to be told a story. “America was in the toilet, now we’re making America great again.” That’s a terrific story. And he tells it so well.’ He didn’t need to spell out who ‘he’ was. They both knew.

  ‘ “We’ve created more jobs than ever before.” That sounds good. “Wages have never gone up so fast. Before I came in, they were falling. Now they’re going up.” That’s another great story. It’s hopeful, it’s encouraging.’

  ‘And it’s totally false. Jobs and wages were already going up.’

  Mac put the index finger of one hand on his nose, and pointed directly at Maggie with the other. ‘That’s it! You see, you did it right there. Exactly that. Ruining the story with some pesky, annoying, pedantic “fact”.’ He made air quotes with his fingers.

  ‘He wants people to feel good, Maggie. To let them think that, now that he’s there, sitting behind that big desk, they can sleep easy at night. Daddy will look after them. That things were shit before, but they’re getting better now. That the country was overrun with rapists and murderers and criminals before, but now it’s getting safer. And the world respects America now. Like never before.

  ‘Now isn’t that nice? Isn’t that a happy story? But then you and your crowd have to ruin it, with your “reality checks” and “truth squads” and your itemized lists of “demonstrable falsehoods” and “misleading statements”. I mean, what a downer. Such killjoys, every one of you.

  ‘Because “the truth” is a serious party-pooper, Maggie. We’re about to break out the champagne, and then you put your hand in the air and you’re all, “Miss, miss! Miss, I don’t think that’s quite right”, and you’ve ruined everything. And then you get smug and say your job is to point out “inconvenient truths”, like we’re meant to be grateful. I mean, this is what I don’t get about liberals. You think “inconvenient” is something to brag about! Like it’s a selling point. Well, I’ve got news for you: inconvenience is not a good thing. No one wants your inconvenient truths. We’d rather enjoy the bedtime story he was telling us, all tucked up in bed with our warm milk and cookies, before you spoiled it, thank you very much.

  ‘And you know what’s so great? And for this, by the way, I give him one hundred per cent of the credit. I don’t know whether I’d have ever even seen it, if it hadn’t been for him. He understood that the truth is weak.

  ‘That’s right, Maggie: weak. All this stuff – the historical record, the facts, the truth – you guys always big it up like it’s some terrifying adversary. But now, thanks to him, I know that the opposite is true. It’s fragile.’

  He was out of his chair again, pacing, apparently revived by the point he was about to make. ‘Oh, for years, we all acted like the truth was the mightiest force in the known universe. The second someone dared stray from the facts, the media jumped all over them. The Times would have an orgasm because it found the documents that showed that Governor This or Mayor That had “uttered a falsehood” and there’d be calls for their resignation and then the politician would shuffle up to the podium, head down, tail between his legs’ – Mac had moulded his body into the sullen shape of a guilty schoolboy – ‘and they’d say, “I must apologize. I misspoke.” Misspoke! Whatever the fuck that is. And usually they’d have to quit. Because everyone accepted that they’d done the worst thing anyone could ever imagine: they’d lied.’ Mac put his hands over his mouth, and collapsed back into his chair like a Victorian lady on her fainting couch, shocked at a glimpse of ankle.

  ‘Not to play the boring old guy, but I came up after Watergate. Do you know what single question gripped – I mean, obsessed – this country for two years? One question: did Nixon lie? That was it! As if that was the ultimate crime.


  ‘And Nixon – so innocent, so naïve – went along with it! He didn’t see that through all those denials, all that “I am not a crook” bullshit, he was accepting – tacitly, of course, implicitly – that lying was the greatest crime known to man. Tying himself up in knots, torturing the English language, just so he wouldn’t be caught in a lie.

  ‘It was the same with you-know-who getting his dick sucked in the Oval Office. “I did not have sexual relations” and “It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” All these pathetic politicians doing backflips, just to stay on the right side of “the truth”.

  ‘And then along comes the man who is now our president – and guess what? He refuses to play the game. He doesn’t tangle himself up this way and that to stay on the right side of the line marked “truth”, because he doesn’t give a fuck. He just says what he wants. He tells people he was against that shit-useless war, and then they find a tape of him supporting the war, but he doesn’t care and here’s the thing: no one else cares either.

  ‘There’s some policy of his everyone hates? “That wasn’t me,” he says. “That was my opponent.” No, all the media bigwigs say. That was you. Here’s the order you signed, just a few weeks ago. “No,” he says. “It’s their policy and I’m trying to fix it. If only they would help me.”

  ‘I mean, you gotta hand it to him, Maggie. Even though he’s wrong, and there’s hard, written, documented proof that he’s wrong – that he’s lying – his followers all believe him. Forty per cent of the country say he’s telling the truth. And a whole lot more don’t know who to believe.’

  McNamara started clapping. ‘I mean, give that man a round of applause. What fools he’s made of the rest of us who grew up terrified, trembling in the face of “The Truth”.’ McNamara intoned those last two words in a deep, Hollywood voice-over baritone.

  ‘I mean it, Maggie. I was petrified. As a kid, I pictured it – the truth – like it was this real thing, two giant tablets of stone in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, looming over me. All that stuff – “The truth will out”, “The truth will set you free” – that could make a kid shit himself. We were all like that, trying to stay on the right side of the truth, until this great, extraordinary man comes along and says, “Fuck that.” Fuck that. He just lies and gets away with it. Because no one cares. They move on to the next thing. That was his great insight. No one cares.

  ‘That’s what I mean when I say the truth is weak, Maggie. It is weak and feeble. We thought it was so strong, but it relied on everyone bowing down to it. The minute someone had the balls to say, “Fuck that”, it just crumbled. It just took one little boy with the courage to point at the naked emperor and say, “That man is fully clothed”, and the truth collapsed into a heap. It didn’t even have the stomach for a fight.

  ‘Its fatal flaw, you see, Maggie, was that it relied on shame. Truth relied on shame. People were embarrassed to be caught in a lie. They were ashamed of it. Before him, no one wanted to do it. But then this once-in-a-generation, hell, once-in-a-millennium man comes along and he couldn’t give a rat’s asshole. He doesn’t even blush. He feels no shame. He doesn’t care. And because he doesn’t care, you don’t need to care either. And, just like that, it’s over. Truth is dead.

  ‘It’s funny, don’t you think? All these great thinkers and philosophers, and it takes this man who they all think is a moron and a fraud to point out something they never saw. To teach them this huge lesson. That the truth is powerless against a man who does not mind lying and lying brazenly. It is powerless against a man with no shame.’

  Mac drained the last of the champagne, then leaned down to pull a bottle of water from a pack of twelve below his desk and chugged most of that back. He looked as if he’d just run a ten-K. Crawford McNamara was an aerobic talker, the only person Maggie knew capable of working himself into a sweat just through conversation or, more accurately, monologue.

  ‘I don’t blame you for not getting this, Maggie. I really don’t. Because you’re not American. So you’re off the hook. But the others? Don’t they realize, this is what America is about? It’s what America is for. America is the land where you write your own script, tell your own story – whatever you want it to be. Don’t let a few tedious, Ivy League, dry as a nun’s snatch, UN-backed, peer-reviewed, limp-wristed, European “facts” get in your way. Leave that to the bores in the reality-based community. Write your own story. That’s what America’s about. And that’s what he’s doing. And that’s why he’s still there, behind the big desk in the Oval, despite your best efforts.’

  As he took in some air, Maggie jumped in. ‘Which means you – he – could just keep lying. Who cares if “my crowd” hit back? None of what we say matters anyway, not with the true believers. His base. They accept everything he says. So just keep saying it. Why bother destroying all the facts that could prove you wrong?’

  ‘Besides the sheer pleasure in seeing you all go out of your minds, you mean? Which, don’t knock it, by the way. I mean, that’s a thrill. Next time he says, “No president has ever achieved so much in such a short space of time” and you all run back to the record books to prove him wrong and you start looking for all the great things FDR did or Lincoln and – guess what – there’s nothing there. All the records and books have burned to a crisp! I mean, man, that is just gonna be a priceless moment. And it’s already happening, by the way. After that big library went up in Oxford, how can you prove there ever was a Queen Elizabeth the First? I mean, really prove it. Maybe it’s just a fairy story. Virgin queen, virgin birth: maybe it’s all bullshit. Who can tell?

  ‘But while I truly believe that the tears of liberals are the elixir of life – you can take your whisky and champagne, give me a keg of liberal tears, neat, every day of the week – that’s not the main reason. More a happy byproduct, if you know what I mean. As always, and add this to the ever-expanding list of things liberals don’t know shit about, the real deal is – drumroll, please, maestro,’ and here Mac mimed a furious pounding of a snare, ‘power. Power.

  ‘You know all that horseshit about a “well-informed citizenry”? How it’s necessary for a healthy democracy and that’s why we need a free press and all that crap? Well, maybe I believed that before I worked in the White House – maybe – but I can tell you, now that I’ve been there, if you’re the people running the show, that is the very last thing you want.

  ‘Confusion. That’s what you want. Confusion is your best friend. The ideal people to rule over are either people who love you or, if you can’t have that, people who are confused. The more confused, the better. When the folks don’t know what’s true and what’s false, and they don’t know who to believe, well, then you can do what the fuck you like.

  ‘Like, and I love this one because we did this and it actually worked, let’s say you want to give your pals a big, fat, juicy, T-bone tax cut. You can say: “We’re passing this new tax bill, it’s going to make you all ten per cent richer.” And then all the liberals will say, “No, it won’t! There’s independent economic modelling which shows that scheduled over six fiscal years, while there might be some benefit for the bottom two income deciles, that will be more like four point three per cent, tapering to three point two per cent” and on and on, and we just go, “Ten per cent richer!” And we keep saying it. And then they realize that their fancy study was too complicated and no one understood it, so they try to make it simple and say: “It won’t make you ten per cent richer. That’s a terrible lie!” And they produce another “independent, academic” report proving your ten per cent figure is wrong. And they’re completely right, by the way. The ten per cent thing is pure bullshit. But guess what’s happened? Two things, both of them good for us and terrible for you and your crowd.

  ‘First, there’s now only one figure that everyone remembers. Ten per cent. All the four point threes and three point whatevers, no one can remember any of that. The only thing normal people remember is ten per cent. “Hey, wasn’t there that ten per cent tax cut?” Nice round
number, easy. And you know why they remember it? Because you folks kept saying it. Even when you were denying it, you were saying it over and over again – ten per cent, ten per cent, ten per cent. All you’ve done is reinforce it! Which is so beautiful.

  ‘But let’s say some people kinda half listened to all your bellyaching. If you ask them, “Will this tax bill make you richer or poorer?” they either say, “Ten per cent richer!” or they shrug. Because they’re confused. Which is just great. I love those people who shrug.’ He sang to the ceiling, ‘ “Give me your shrugging masses, yearning to breathe free!” Seriously. I love them. Almost as much as the poorly educated, although there’s an overlap obviously. But the confused, they’re just the best. Because no one goes out onto the streets when they’re confused. They stay home or watch the ballgame or mow the lawn or jerk off into their wife’s underwear drawer or whatever, but they don’t protest.

  ‘Incidentally, you ever notice what the president’s favourite phrase is? Uses it all the time? Don’t worry, I won’t make you guess. “Nobody really knows.” He loves that one. “Nobody really knows who shot down that plane, nobody really knows.” “Nobody really knows what’s going on with the climate, nobody knows for sure.” He doesn’t care if you don’t agree with him that climate change is a hoax. That’s OK. Main thing he wants is that you don’t know. That’s good enough for him. If you agree with the statement, “Nobody really knows . . .” then God love you. If you shrug your shoulders – not one of those neurotic Jew shrugs, but a genuinely dumb shrug, like you’re indifferent to the truth – that’s the best. That’s what he wants. It’s like the title of that book: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. I love that title. Love it. Because when nothing is true, everything is possible. Did we just blow all that money on some failed policy? Did we just do a deal with a hostile foreign power to funnel some cash to the president’s kids? Did we just drop a bomb in the wrong place and kill a whole bunch of civilians?’ He shrugged. ‘ “Nobody really knows.” You see, when nobody knows anything, you can do anything.’