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When Rudolph Giuliani stated “Truth isn’t truth!”, its meaning was not contextual. It was a complete sentence in and of itself, delivered with Freudian force and terminated with an exasperated exclamation mark. The irony of trying to later spin a different truth about that statement only succeeded in clarifying its real truth. If there is any context at all, it can be found in the previous assaults on truth by the current administration. It can be seen in the statement by Kellyanne Conway defending Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s untruth about attendance numbers at Trump’s inauguration in which she stated with utter clarity that the administration was not lying but instead offering “alternative facts.” It can be seen in Donald Trump’s words when he recently addressed veterans with a statement carrying all the cadence of hypnotic suggestion, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what is happening.” The lies are not only defined by these instances, but widely practiced. The Washington Post tabulated 4,229 false or misleading statements by President Donald Trump leading into Last August.
My own journey to the truth was at the hands of my father. At the back of his right hand actually. I was eleven and thought I had devised the perfect lie, which I suppose is the goal of most mischievous boys who adventure out to test the boundaries of their recently minted lives. My dad confronted me in the long upstairs hallway of our house and asked a point-blank question requiring me to either confirm or deny the truth I thought only I knew. To me, it was a no-brainer. He couldn’t possibly know. And the easy lie had not left my lips for more than two seconds when his shocking back-handed slap knocked me silly. “You LIED!”
My father was a gentle man, but his red line was right there where the definition of a truth could dare cross over into a lie. In my life, he struck me only once or twice (I don’t count the spankings). But I remember that slap. In fact, as I write this, I can still feel the sting of his sharp rebuke across my face. Mostly, I remember the hugs and the kisses. But just as important was that one well-placed smack that reverberated throughout my life and drilled into me something about truth and integrity.
The darkness of a lie is that it consumes not only the gullible but also the liar. A quote with questionable attribution to Nazi Germany Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is this: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” The antidote is a Shakespearean quote my father used to repeat to me from Polonius in Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Lying is a choice that begins separately from honesty. Honesty begins with what we know is true in our hearts, and a lie speaks to what we know is not true. At first, the lines are not blurred. But if we tell enough lies, we risk losing ourselves in them – and along with it our integrity.
Truth in politics has always been an issue. I know where it falls in science and technology, however. Practicing medicine based upon “alternative facts” is a quick and effective way to having less healthy patients. And in my aviation career, I’ve experienced more than once the seductive words well up within me: “What you are seeing is not what is happening.” Buying into the tempting comfort of those words promised a short-cut around the first step in an emergency, which is to identify the problem. Find the truth. Which engine failed? Is the FIRE light a just indicator problem or are there secondaries? Military training taught me that honesty is the first ingredient in survival – just as surely as honor is the first ingredient in character.
In the final analysis, truth eludes those who dare not look for it. It belongs instead to people of honor – to those brave enough to seek it.
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