“Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas.”  ~Shoseki

If you are among the vast majority of Homo sapiens who ascribe to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and therefore believe that you are the unique result of millions of years of genetic mutation, adaptation and natural selection, you will probably agree that our success as a species is in large part due to our endowment with and constant refinement of our forbears most successful survival traits.

For example, it is no longer necessary for many of us to actually scavenge for food or, upon finding some, to quickly determine whether what we have found will make us stronger – or kill us.  Nevertheless, we still embody that slow accretion of knowledge and discriminatory skill, encoded in our DNA, thanks to the success of our hunter/gatherer ancestors who “lived to forage another day” – and procreate.  A more subtle inheritance from that era might reasonably be a primacy of autonomous thinkers – by that I mean something along these lines:  if three hunter gatherers stumble upon the same mushroom patch and two of them partake while one abstains, and, if later, the two mushroom-eaters keel over, we can be pretty certain that the hungry one will have learned a valuable lesson about the “herd mentality.”

Whether we recognize it or not, our hunter/gatherer skills are still relevant and active in the more abstract realm of the “quest for Truth” (for lack of a less hackneyed phrase).

Welcome to the 21st Century

Recently, we have been bombarded by events that require close scrutiny and informed analysis if we are to survive and advance.  The 9/11 Attacks, the Invasion of Iraq, collapsing world economies, the long slog in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the general militarization of America, anti-immigration hysteria, Islamophobia, the Gulf Oil Disaster — to name a few —  are recent complex developments that challenge our survival in real ways.   These types of events are not unique in human history, and, as a species we have surmounted and survived worse; but a key factor in our ability to cope with such challenges, to parse them and pursue successful outcomes is knowing the Truth.

We are told that we live in the “Information Age” which implies that there are vast resources and readily available tools for virtually anyone on the planet with Internet access to learn about or contribute to a body of knowledge on every conceivable topic.  But “information” is not always – or even often – true; unfortunately we rely on “information” to make decisions of great consequence about things that we know very little about. 

We live in a very advanced and complex society that, in many cases, requires quite specialized training and knowledge to fully understand one small aspect of it.  Our brains aren’t currently capable of grasping the entirety of our world so we must rely on each other in a distributive fashion.  To revisit my earlier example, that means that we must rely on the fellow who watched his companions eat poisonous mushrooms and die to tell us which mushrooms we should avoid at all costs.  That also means that we must put a lot of trust in our erstwhile survivor to give us accurate mushroom information because, if he happens to recall some old grudge or covets your well-made spear, he might conceivably tell you that the poisonous mushrooms are the very ones to eat.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, we humans still seem to carry some ancient, instinctive reverence for truth that leads us to probe and test information until we are satisfied that we have done all we can to arrive at it.  We will abide many foibles in our fellow humans but lying still crosses an existential line into taboo.  As parents, teachers, partners/spouses, employers and other authority figures we all eventually get around to sending the age-old message “I don’t care what else you do, just don’t lie to me” that we learned as children.  We even employ some primitive, animal instincts to discern truth-telling reading “body language,” perspiration, voice characteristics, agitation and eye contact.  Evidently, arriving at the truth has been a major contributor to our evolutionary success as a species and is firmly embedded in our DNA as a “keeper” survival skill.

 * * *

Congruent with the Internet revolution in information access, the so-called “corporatization of America” has made great strides to the extent that the US Supreme Court has officially recognized corporations’ “rights” to influence US political campaigns with donations limited only by their corporate “buying power.”  So, while we still have a representative democracy, it’s not always so easy to figure out who our elected officials actually represent.

Corporations, now firmly ensconced in the political cat-bird seat, bring along with them their own corporate culture and style of communication, otherwise known as PR – Public Relations.  Those elected officials to whom corporations provide patronage, in their turn, are keen to embrace corporate customs to demonstrate how well they might fit into corporate culture once their tenure in government is over. 

As anyone who has ever spent any time in the “belly of the PR beast” will tell you, PR is all about image, perception and spin in service of creating mass appeal.  Mass appeal in turn can be arrived at from two opposite directions: natural “mass appeal” qualities can be persuasively played up such that the masses readily recognize a product or service as desirable and associate the messenger with the product; or, from the opposite direction, a desire for a specific product or service can be generated in the masses by the same masters of persuasion.  The difference, of course, is in the starting point: one approach anticipates what the public wants/needs and supplies it (or alleges it does); the other starts with what the corporation wants/needs and gins up a market for it.

And all of this goes on in the background while American taxpayers struggle to try to make sense of governmental mixed messages, erratic policy-making and rapidly increasing distance from the lives and concerns of ordinary American citizens.  We are drowning in a sea of half-truth and downright lies that is every bit as toxic and threatening to life as we know it as the nasty glop that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico.

* * * 

What I find interesting, lately, is that nerves are starting to fray on both sides of the truth divide –evidently lying is almost as taxing as being lied to, in the long run.

A great example is the recent commotion caused by the New York Times’ investigative “scoop” revealing America’s discovery of vast mineral wealth lying under the rubble of Afghanistan.  I already devoted a good amount of space to the particulars of that story and don’t need to dredge that up as the issue has received ample media play.  I’m more interested in the update to the story of the author’s, and the Times’, reaction to the general media outcry that the story was a transparent piece of propaganda, planted in the Times, to distract from increasing public and Congressional uneasiness with the progress of the war in Afghanistan.

The blogosphere and some left-leaning media types immediately objected that the American public was being played for fools that would not see through such a sophomoric example of Pentagon PR.  The chief beef was that this was old news in “breaking news” clothing.  Most critics questioned the timing of the story, coming as it did at the end of a bad news cycle for the war, the Karzai Government, the Obama administration and the Gen. McChrystal’s Kandahar project.  Oh yeah . . . and one day before Gen. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before Congress about the war.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote that the story “suggest[s] a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote that “the timing of the revelation is enough to raise some suspicions in my mind.” And Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell wrote that “there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye.”

A day later, the Times’ author, James Risen, mounted a fairly tasteless and condescending “defense” of his article in an interview with Yahoo’s John Cook, who characterized Risen as “increasingly hostile.”  Evidently, Risen believes that the “best defense is a good offense” because the interview was primarily an attack on bloggers rather than a substantive defense of his article.  According to Cook, Risen later phoned back to apologize for his bad behavior but not before stating that “Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas.”

As Jason Linkins reported on the Huffington Post, the published statement was Cook’s truncated version of Risen’s actual words which were that the aforementioned bloggers were “j**king off in their pajamas.”

Continuing in that vein, Risen said:

“The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories.” “Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.”

As John Cook explained about that one:

“Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.”

Cook , in an effort to get back on point, asked for Risen’s reaction to claims that his story covered “old news.”  Risen’s response:

“If it wasn’t news, then why didn’t anybody write about it?”

As Cook and many others pointed out, the story had been previously reported by McClatchy Newspapers and Agence France Presse and the central claim — that Afghanistan had a vast vein of valuable mineral deposits — was discussed publicly by Hamid Karzai just a month ago. Risen’s response to that was to insist that “no one picked up on it.”

The final question remaining is whether or not Risen’s story was a piece of pro-war propaganda planted by the Pentagon.  Risen adamantly denies that the Pentagon “leaked” the story to him (despite ready quotes from Gen. Petraeus.)  The “truth” about the sources that Risen volunteered in the interview, though, did little to allay suspicions about the intent of the article.  Risen cited Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who was active in Afghanistan in the 1980s a source.  Evidently Bearden is acting as a consultant to one Paul Brinkley who is a deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of the survey team that is currently appraising the Afghan Motherlode for the Pentagon.

The Bearden/Brinkley connection is quite a story unto itself; Steve Hynd of Newshoggers heard alarms going off in his head when he read of Risen citing Bearden as a source and his reporting on that angle is a must-read.

Leo Tolstoy once said that:

“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

Suffice it to say that this story is still in need of a good scrubbing

* * * 

As I said earlier, we are swimming in a swamp of lies, from multiple sources and for multiple reasons.  We are under constant assault by partisan think tanks and political pundits; military officers masquerading as policy analysts and media experts; “embedded” journalists reporting on what the military lets them see of our wars; political hacks with secret agendas like The Long War or a theocratic America, a news media that hammers us daily for months with frightening reports that America is seething with Anti-Incumbent Rage and Anarchic Fever Dreams, yet when primaries are held 98% of incumbents win (and those who don’t have bigger problems).

Lies, hyperbole and disinformation have become so endemic in our culture that they come marching at us naked, these days, much like the overstatements and false claims of advertisers and spinmeisters. 

We are complicit in those lies, too; we know that advertisers are lying to us and we still give them our money.  We know that politicians are lying to us and we still give them our votes and our money.  We are not less evolved, we know quite well when we’re being lied to but many of us are too weary or jaded to care.  As for the corporations and the government they’ve bought, lying is a non-issue, a lesser sin rationalized as expedient for the greater good.  As Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine used to say:  “We’re the Phone Company, we don’t have to care.”

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