By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Do bothersome facts matter anymore?
Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured
that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles.
Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the
deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter,
given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.
The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable
problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to
be, depending on the political climate of any given week.
Some days Americans are told there is no reason to
restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry
from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines
are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public
concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African
country.
Ebola is so hard to catch that there is no reason to
worry about casual exposures to those without clear symptoms. But then why do
health authorities still try to hunt down anyone who had even a brief encounter
with supposedly asymptomatic carriers?
The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were caused by a
video that sparked a riot, and then apparently not. Various narratives about
corruption and incompetence at the VA, IRS, NSA, GSA, and Secret Service are
raised and then dropped. The larger truth is that these scandals must be
quarantined from infecting the president’s progressive agenda.
Laws used to be real, not abstract. Again, not anymore.
The administration sort of enacts some elements of Obamacare but ignores
others. Enforcement of federal immigration law is negotiable, likewise
depending on the campaign cycle.
The Tawana Brawley case, the Duke men’s lacrosse team
accusations, and the O. J. Simpson verdict were constructed fantasies. No one
cared much about the inconvenient facts or the lies that destroyed people’s
lives — given that myths were deemed useful facts for achieving larger racial
justice.
It no longer really matters much what the grand jury will
find in the Michael Brown fatal-shooting case. Whether he had just robbed a
store, was high on drugs, was walking down the middle of the road and prompted
a violent confrontation with a police officer, or whether the officer was the
aggressor in the confrontation, these have become mere competing narratives.
The facts pale in comparison with the higher truth that Brown was black and
unarmed, while Officer Darren Wilson was white and armed. The latter scenario
is all that matters.
Language is useful for inventing new realities. “Illegal
alien” is a time-tested phrase denoting foreign citizens who crossed a national
border contrary to law. “Undocumented immigrant” is now used to diminish the
bothersome fact that millions have broken and continue to break the law.
To play down the dangers of radical Islam, an entire
array of circumlocutions — “workplace violence” (in the case of the Fort Hood
shooting), “overseas contingency operations,” and “man-caused disasters” — were
the euphemisms evoked by members of the Obama administration to construct an
alternative reality in which radical jihadists are no more dangerous than
disgruntled office workers or gale-force winds.
Many of the current campus poster icons are abject myths.
Che Guevara, for all his hipster appearance, was no revolutionary hero, but a
murderer who enjoyed personally executing his political opponents. Communist
leader Angela Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the totalitarian
Soviet Union.
Plagiarism and making stuff up are no longer considered
serious offenses against the truth. Lots of notable columnists or historians
have had to confess to lifting the work of others and passing it off as their
own — Maureen Dowd, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, and the late Stephen
Ambrose, to name a few. Most faced slaps on the wrist.
Even Vice President Joe Biden once had to drop a
presidential bid due to accusations that he had plagiarized in law school and
later had copied a speech from a British Labor politician. Barack Obama has had
to acknowledge that in his autobiographical memoir, he used “composite
characters” in some cases rather than actual people from his life. Sympathetic
biographer David Remnick characterized Obama’s life story as “a mixture of
verifiable fact, recollection, re-creation, invention, and artful shaping.”
Such disregard for truth and facts is no accident, but
the fruit of postmodernism. So-called “after modern” thought was a trendy
late-20th-century way to reduce facts to stories.
Progressives believed that because traditional protocols,
language, and standards were usually created by stuffy old establishment types,
the rules no longer necessarily should apply. Instead, particular narratives
and euphemisms that promoted perceived social justice became truthful.
Bothersome facts were discarded.
So far, political mythmaking has been confined to popular
culture and politics, and has not affected the ironclad facts and
non-negotiable rules of jetliner maintenance, heart surgery, or nuclear-plant
operation. Yet the Ebola scare has taught us that even the erroneous news
releases and fluid policies of the CDC can be as likely based on politics as
hard science.
If that is a vision of more relativist things to come,
then we are doomed.
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