The sad reality of a post-truth country
The first thing is to tame the rage so that you do not live in it all the time. Or worse, repressing it so often and so much that it calcifies into all-consuming despair. That won’t do.
The next thing is to cultivate joy stubbornly and aggressively. You know, that “pursuit of happiness” business. It is not easy to do it in our madhouse of a country. You know it and I know it.
They know it, too, the citizens of MAGA nation, whether they will admit it or not. How exhausting it must be to watch the daily chaos in America, the unpredictable array of insane acts large and small. How difficult to shore up the elaborate forms of denial which make it all “OK.”
This involves turning to the usual right-wing propaganda sources that reassure MAGA nation that what they thought they saw is not really what they saw. Because that would be terrible. There has to be some other explanation, and there always is.
Those weren’t violent insurrectionist thugs storming the Capitol on January 6. They were peaceful tourists. Or Antifa. Or Democrats impersonating Republicans. They weren’t criminals who would eventually be convicted. They were political prisoners who would need to be pardoned.
Renee Good wasn’t murdered in the street. She was a trained assassin with a deadly weapon attempting to kill an ICE agent, who had no choice but to shoot her three times, to shoot her in the face, to call her a “fucking bitch” after doing so and then somehow bravely walking away despite having been run over.
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Never mind what the footage shows. Never mind what the facts are. In our post-truth, post-reality world, everything is negotiable. Wait an hour or two and there will be a narrative to give you comfort, one you can take to social media if you are so inclined. There will be a thousand memes. There will be a justification for anything, for everything.
Even if you are the quiet type, a good person who truly strives to do the right thing, you will be supplied with a rationale for what has happened so that your nights are not haunted by images of a young mother turning the wheel away from the agent, trying to avoid hitting him, or of her children’s stuffed animals in the car just a few feet away from the blood-soaked airbag.
Or her final words, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
And his: “Fucking bitch.”
It did not take long after her death for the usual strategy of demonizing the victim to emerge. She was an unfit mother. A child abuser. An unhinged lesbian. Or my favorite, a “domestic terrorist.”
Do you remember what we were all told during the campaign, that ICE would be primarily involved in finding and deporting illegals who were criminals and thugs to make the country safer? How long was it before that changed into all illegals, including restaurant workers, college students, or mothers in car lines? And how much longer after that until it changed to anyone who didn’t have their papers on them, even if they are American citizens?
This is where we are in America now. ‘Show me your papers, or else.’
Yes, rage is the appropriate response. It’s the appropriate response for the president’s threats to take possession of Greenland by any means necessary. It is the appropriate response for his complete about-face on the release of the Epstein files, which was a linchpin of his campaign but now magically transformed into a “Democrat hoax.”
We have less than 1% of the files, much of that heavily redacted, but we have been inundated with so much chaos that it is hard to stay focused and consider why the Department of Justice is refusing to release everything. Golly, do you think that might be more than a coincidence?
Politics have become so tribal that it is hard for MAGA nation to believe that any Democrat would be in favor of criminal prosecution of a Democrat if there were damning evidence in the Epstein files of criminal conduct, but this is just more evidence that we live in a post-truth world. If it were found that Bill Clinton was having sex with 13-year-old girls, there is no Democrat I know who would not want him prosecuted.
The foundation for all of this is the systematic demonizing of the Democratic Party by the right for the past four decades. In this view, Democrats are not just the opposing party with a different view of the role of government and a different set of values. Democrats are the enemy. Democrats are socialists. Democrats are “very bad people.” Democrats are anti-American.
It is no coincidence that ICE agents are swarming Minnesota rather than Texas and Florida. Democrats are the enemy, and Minnesota is a blue state.
So, as a registered voter in the enemy party, let me tell you what most of us stand for. A living wage. Affordable healthcare. Investment in education. Respect and fair treatment of every person, regardless of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Sensible gun control, which certainly does NOT mean disarming American citizens. A fair tax system that does not favor or reward the wealthy. Democracy: voting should be easier instead of harder. A belief that government can and should be a force for good, as it often has been in the past. Remembering that the Constitution includes more than just the Second Amendment and that all of our rights must be preserved. A belief in the separation of powers. A free press, with accountability to the truth.
To a large degree, we Democrats have been let down by our own party on some of these issues. We know that. To a large degree, you have been let down by yours, although it is less a party now than it is the rule and whim of one man. The Republican Party is no longer the party of conservative values and small government. Far from it. It is MAGA nation, nothing more and nothing less. It is far less clear to the rest of us that you know that.
We seem to have reached a place in America where we are separated, but not (yet) quite divorced. We aren’t really on speaking terms anymore, and when we are it usually devolves into shouting or depends upon pleasantries that distract us from the unsettling truth of the vastly different realities that we inhabit.
For the Republic to survive, we’re going to have to move past that. We’re going to have to learn to trust each other again. We’re going to have to learn to believe what we see with our own eyes.
(Chris Cox is a recently retired college English teacher and Haywood County resident whose columns have appeared in The Smoky Mountain News for nearly two decades. Reach him at (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and find more of his writing at chriscox157.substack.com.)
