Tired of Winning by Cooke Richard;

Author:Cooke, Richard; [Cooke, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TRUTH KICKS THE BUCKET

Where were you when you heard that truth was dead? I must admit I’ve forgotten. Was it during George W. Bush’s first term? Or maybe earlier, when Bill Clinton said, under oath, that it depended what the meaning of the word ‘is’ was. I do remember that by the mid-2000s liberals had decided a plastic Thanksgiving turkey was the perfect symbol of the Bush presidency (the fact that the fake turkey turned out to be real only made it more apposite). Not long after, a shell-shocked Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason. Perhaps it was Rush Limbaugh, or the internet, or the decline of teaching civics, but sometime between the World Book Encyclopedia era and the Wikipedia era, factual reality in America went out of whack and never went back.

This concern prompted The New York Times’s former chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, to try authorship for the first time. Perhaps too slim to be called her ‘first full-length book’, The Death of Truth is at any rate her first half-length book, instigated by a sensation of ‘losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines’. Her mission is to ‘examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world’. The battle-weary squad of George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ and Richard Hofstadter’s essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ are all called on for another tour of duty.

Kakutani is big on Orwell’s ‘prescience’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. She is not the only one. These pieces of writing must surely rank as the most widely referenced political texts of the twentieth century, influential to the point of perniciousness. As Louis Menand has pointed out, if everyone from ‘ex-Communists, Socialists, left-wing anarchists, right-wing libertarians, liberals, conservatives, doves, hawks, the Partisan Review editorial board, and the John Birch Society’ can lay claim to Orwell’s legacy, then perhaps some of his explanatory power is limited or vague.

Orwell is, I think, especially un-prescient about Trump. The authority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sexless, socialist, parsimonious and bureaucratic, while Trump is promiscuous, mercantile, exuberant and vernacular. When he generates untruths prolifically, they come from boastfulness and ignorance more than from Machiavellian scheming – Big Brother wasn’t watching morning telescreen shows and then railing to his aides about Goldstein. It’s hard to think of a less Orwellian statement about America’s history of violence than ‘You think our country’s so innocent?’, but this vulgar restatement of plain fact in plain language does not improve the situation.

The idea that corrupt language creates corrupt politics wasn’t invented by Orwell: Edward Gibbon, for example, thought that bad Latin grammar contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. Like many aesthetically appealing ideas, it feels intuitively correct, but beyond the harmony is less convincing. It’s unpersuasive in the aftermath of High Obamaism.

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