From Chicago Tribune, an op ed :
On facts, lies and Sarah Palin
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome
will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats
can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of
productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."
Sarah Palin, Aug. 7, 2009
The death panels are back.
Sarah Palin's vision of a dystopian society in which the
elderly and infirm would be required to justify their continued
existence before a jury of federal functionaries has been widely
ridiculed since she first posted it on Facebook three years ago. It was
designated "Lie of the Year" by Politifact, the nonpartisan
fact-checking website, something that would have mortified and
humiliated anyone who was capable of those feelings.
Last week,
Palin doubled down. "Though I was called a liar for calling it like it
is," she posted, "many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did
in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to
make life-and-death decisions about health care funding." Note that
that's not actually the claim she made in 2009. Of course, Obamacare,
aka the Affordable Care Act, was upheld by theU.S. Supreme Court on
Thursday, which must gratify Team Obama.
But we are not here to
discuss that. Neither are we here to litigate Palin's claim about "death
panels." That you could fertilize the Great Lawn of Central Park with
that lie has been well established. No, we are only here to ask whether
that matters, given the increasingly obvious impotence of fact.
Not
long ago, if you told a whopper like Palin's and it was as thoroughly
debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days,
it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem
overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them.
Indeed,
falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through
with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber
media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain
imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long
enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to
believe it, truth.
That is the lesson of the birthers and
truthers, of Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement"
about Planned Parenthood, of Glenn Beck's claim that conservatives
founded the Civil Rights Movement, and of pretty much every word Michele
Bachmann says. It seems that not only are facts no longer important,
but they are not even the point.
Rather, the point is the
construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to
enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of
prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from
outside forces.
This is the state of American political discourse,
particularly on the political right, where a sense of dislocation,
disaffection and general been-done-wrongness has become sine qua non,
coin of the realm, lingua franca of the true believers — and of their
true belief in the desperate need to turn back the unrighteous Other and
his unwelcome change.
To score Palin for being unfactual, then,
is to bring boxing gloves to a knife fight. The death panels are not
about fact. They are about fear and the shameless manipulation thereof
for political gain.
The result of which is that Americans
increasingly occupy two realities, one based on the conviction that
facts matter, the other on the notion that facts are only what you need
them to be in a given moment. That ought to give all of us pause because
it leads somewhere we should not want to go. When two realities divide
one people, the outcome seems obvious.
They cannot remain one people.
