#3 THE POWER OF THE WORD–Part One: A Naked Lunch Served up to Lying Eyes

One thing consistently haunts me as we edge globally into a permanent state of Orwellian doublespeak.

It’s not merely the weakening of journalism within the American democracy at the hands of social media–to some degree, a purely free market pivot. Who wants to pay for it, after all, despite its cornerstone value to accurate knowledge?

And it does turn out that lying is a good deal more efficient and cost-effective than rigorously refining your narrative and back-checking your facts, which nowadays comes across as quaint.

Until recently none of that has mattered to the Russian audience of the Ukraine war narrative. They’ve accepted it as it’s fed to them. Do some Russians quietly wince at the law Putin passed to imprison you for calling the war in Ukraine a “war”? Does it get anymore Orwellian than that?

But that’s precisely where it stands. Only their selective, alternative diction can be spoken legally. Calling a war a “war” brings down the power of the state upon you.

The American rightwing’s normal strategy has been distraction. Their shouts rise to the heavens about which restrooms trans people choose and immigrants massed at the border and critical race theory in elementary schools. Immigration may be way down from decades ago, and certainly nobody studies critical race theory in elementary school. (Is that what fifth grade is like in Mississippi?)

But, well, trans people do use restrooms, so there’s that.

All of this effectively keeps people from looking more closely at what matters. But when it does come to those things–rushing over the cliff of global warming, for instance–they simply deny it. If a disease sweeps the Earth killing people en masse, that’s a lie. If it’s going to hurt our election prospects, it has no reality.

But what a lie! It’s told with such passion, such conviction, and such incessant repetition, the North Dakota man dying of COVID-19 in a hospital bed harassed the nurse trying to save his life, insisting that this is all some bullshit invention of Democrats. It must have been a relief to stick tubes down the guy’s throat so he’d shut the fuck up.

By the same token, those in Ukraine who’ve called their relatives in Russia to describe the horror that’s engulfed them have gotten complete, 100% disbelief. Their fully conditioned loved ones see only what they’re told to see, and actual, on the ground witnesses have no validity.

But this is what deeply bugs me.

Though the American rightwing has completely entered a post-factual fantasy world, where it can with impunity deny the disease than kills hundreds of thousands of its own adherents, and its evil twin in Russia can pursue a war killing thousands of Russian citizens and refuse to let the term “war” pass anyone’s lips, they have nothing to stand on if their own people don’t swallow it as “reality.”

A shitstorm of unimaginable proportions waits on the other side of their lies. Like the Dutch dike system that holds back the sea, the only protection they have is that you believe them.

It’s the world’s most compelling fig leaf. And in the end, it’s composed of nothing but words.

(Next time: Part Two: In the Beginning Was the Word, or How We got Incarcerated in an Orwellian Mandala)