Lies told often enough become alternative facts.....
Recently, I attended a dinner party at old friends’ house,
and I expected a relaxed evening. The
food was spectacular, a very finely nuanced codfish, served on a bed of
exquisite lentils. That dish was
preceded by a mango-yellow tomato soup, with really fine wines and a desert of
homemade pie, fresh blueberries rolling off the top of a delectable key lime
filling. Our hosts were flawlessly
polite and gracious. Most of the meal
was spent on polite conversation, where are you from, do you have kids, and
other pleasantries.
Another couple attended, whom we did not know, and whom, I
believe our hosts had just met. A neurologist on the staff of the University of
Miami school of Medicine. Born in
Mexico, he had been in the United States, I believe, for twenty years. He was an intelligent, soft-spoken fellow and
but had some infuriating opinions, including a denunciation of Hillary
Clinton’s emails and that President Obama was the worst president of the United
States ever to inhabit the White House.
He reluctantly admitted that Obama had been born in the United States,
but had Muslim sympathies and was anti-Semitic.
He also professed his deep admiration for Benjamin Netanyahu
and the excellence of Donald Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem as a
symbol of American strength, “the only things the Arabs understand.”
Other perorations included the inherent bias of the New York
Times, The Washington Post, anti-Semitism of Thomas Friedman, and the bias of
the American media, against Donald Trump.
Although he said he did not object to a two-state solution, he defended
the settlements and that Israel had no partner for peace negotiations, citing
the result in Gaza when Israel pulled out and stating that the same thing would
happen to the West Bank, should Israel cede sovereignty to the Palestinian authority.
He presented himself as an authority in these matters by
stating that he had been to Israel many times and therefore was in a better
position than American Jews to analyze the situation than those of us who had
only visited a few times. Also, that since he came from Mexico, he understood
America and its constitution better than ordinary Americans. He made no mention of the corruption of
Mexican politics having any potential influence on his ideas.
I hate condescending people who confer greater expertise on
themselves simply because they have visited a place a few more times than
others or they simply had a different life experience.
He did recognize that 70% of Israelis wanted peace and were
willing to give up the settlements for a peace treaty with the Palestinian authority
but said that Israel would still have to occupy the territories to provide
security for Israel. I did not disagree
with him.
I argued with him, however, that most secular American Jews
now believe that religious zealotry among those who are in the settlements are
an impediment to a peace treaty, that the borders are basically already
decided, and that with minor land swaps there could possibly be a settlement.
At that point the conversation returned to his advancing the
argument that Trump was a great president, and that the economy was
booming. Moreover, he claimed that
Obamacare had destroyed the private practice of medicine in the United States,
that President Obama was the worst president ever, and had lied about people
keeping their own doctor. I was enraged
that he created a false moral equivalence between the constant lies and
criminality of Trump and Obama.
When I pointed out to him that 30 million people now were
covered and that before they were not and that insurance companies could
dismiss clients for preexisting conditions and now, they could not, it fell
upon deaf ears.
I asked this gentleman where he got his news. He said he watched the FOX news channel,
which he claimed was an unbiased arbiter of the facts, unlike the Times, the
Washington Post, or the other biased news media such as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, and
CNN. That all these organs had it in
for the president and were purveyors of fake news.
He told me I should watch FOX between 6-7 pm for an unbiased
news menu, ostensibly to prove that all of FOX was therefore “fair and
balanced.” I said,” let me get this
straight,
You want me to watch FOX for one hour and thereby come to
the conclusion that the rest of the day is not propaganda?”
This gentleman, who had set himself up as a latter-day
Mexican Alexis de Tocqueville was judging the American constitution based upon
his marginal understanding of it. He
thought the electoral college was set up as a fair governance of space, rather
than a sorry compromise to get the constitution adopted in 1787 that enabled
slave states to perpetuate their injustice throughout our turbulent history.
He sounded like a rerun of FOX and friends and had no
understanding of the forces that should be dominating our national
discussion: Climate change,
technological displacement, and nuclear war.
The distractions of the FOX news propaganda machine are not limited to
the uneducated.
This led me to inevitably conclude:
FOX is an Orwellian propaganda channel that has been
profoundly destructive of our national polity and that education is often no
defense to persistent lies and propaganda, as Orwell had told us long ago.
FOX sits by itself as an organ of Trump and its hijacked
Republican base, who despite their minority, have managed until now to dominate
the legislative and executive branches of government, exploded the deficit,
shut down the government, encouraged racists, divided the country, fed lies to
the public, shredded the dignity of the Presidency, alienated our allies,
conducted a needless trade war, provided subsidies to large corporations,
disrespected the rule of law, obstructed justice, sullied all those around Trump,
conducted a revolving door for respected diplomats and public servants, trashed
our national intelligence services, including the CIA and the FBI, presided
over the shrinking of the middle class, and is enraptured by a president who is
a blaggard, a crook, a buffoon, a knave and a scoundrel.
I went home with a major headache despite the graciousness
and charm of the hosts of the dinner party.
I guess people really cannot talk any more.
