Quote of the Day (Jessamyn West, on Faces Ruined by ‘Double-Dealing’)

“Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known. One eyelid'll hang down lower than the other, one side of your mouth'll stay stiff while the other smiles. I know a dozen cases like that.” —American novelist Jessamyn West (1902-1984), The Life I Really Lived (1979)

Quote of the Day (Tim O'Brien, on the ‘Mythomania’ Epidemic of the Last Decade)

“Mythomania—or plain old lying—infiltrated churches, schools, hair salons, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms, and nightclubs. Smith & Wesson received seven hundred write-in votes in Topeka’s mayoral race. The Library of Congress was under pressure to ban its copy of the Gutenberg Bible for flaunting the word fornicate and the first two syllables of the word sodomy. Speechwriters jumped aboard. Nannies and city councilmen in Prescott, Arizona, denounced the devil’s codex implanted in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution; NASA was burning down forests in Idaho; the Census Bureau was refusing to count people with blue eyes; Grover Cleveland’s skull was buried under the Watergate complex; vigilantes roamed the nighttime streets of Fargo in search of Democrats and Kenyans; Columbine was a CIA operation; Pearl Harbor never happened; corporations were people; Amazon was a distinguished citizen. In Fulda, where the Truth Tellers were led by Dink O’Neill, his brother Chub, and Chamber of Commerce President Earl Fenstermacher, the burdens of seeding fake unfake news kept them hopping through the hot days of September 2019.”— American novelist Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica (2023)

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoevsky, on ‘The Man Who Lies to Himself’)

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.”— Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1880), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Constance Garnett

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on the ‘Slow, Eating Agony of a Lie’)

“The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That's a running sore.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Advise and Consent,’ on ‘A Washington Kind of Lie’)

 

Johnny Leffingwell [played by Eddie Hodges]: “The phone—Senator Munson.”

Robert Leffingwell [his father, played by Henry Fonda]: “Tell him I've gone out.”

Johnny: “Why?”

Robert: “Because, Johnny, he'll want to do some things that might obligate me.”

Johnny: “I mean, why do you want me to lie? If you're in, you're in; if you're out, you're out.”

Robert: “Son, this is a Washington, D.C. kind of lie. It's when the other person knows you're lying, and also knows you know he knows. You follow?”— Advise and Consent (1962), screenplay by Allen Drury and Wendell Mayes, adapted from the novel by Drury, directed by Otto Preminger

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Needing a Good Memory Before Lying)

“It is not without good reason said ‘that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.’ I know very well that the grammarians distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now, these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie. When they disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy, ’tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped, by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well assured.”—French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Lying,” in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton and edited by William Carew Hazlitt (1877)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on ‘The Taste of Lies’)

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”— American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

We are about to see how many Americans will continue to fall for “the taste of lives,” as they have done since 2016. A quarter century since Ms. Gellhorn's death, lies in this country have not only become appetizing but addictive.

Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II—two military conflicts resulting from the lies of Fascism—also implicitly revealed why so many people fall under the sway of this hideous approach to government when she wrote, “Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on People’s ‘Ridiculous’ Illusions)

“People were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.”—English novelist Mary Ann Evens, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), Middlemarch (1871)

Quote of the Day (V.S. Naipaul, on the Lies ‘We Tell Ourselves’)

"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves." ―Nobel Literature laureate V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), In a Free State (1971)

This election, far more than others, involves lies. Many people would argue with Naipaul’s contention in the passage I have just cited, but I think there is a strong element of truth in it.

The lies “we tell ourselves” involve, of course, self-delusion. The insistence with which the current occupant of the Oval Office has lied about the pandemic—that it would all magically disappear with the onset of warm weather, that a vaccine would be available around Election Day, and, most recently, that Americans should not be “dominated” by COVID-19—raises the question of how much he has come to believe his own falsehoods.

Does he speak with so much certainty because he is, at heart, a salesman so caught up in the moment that he can no longer see the truth about his product?

On the other hand, if Americans decide on Election Day that all the crises of the last four years—but especially the last agonizing one—warrant another term in office for the current administration, then I am afraid that we will be the ones lying to ourselves—and at that point, we will have nobody but ourselves to blame as we fall for one more, perhaps fatal, national self-delusion.

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on the State’s Inversion of Reality—or, ‘1984’ at 70)

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

When it was published 70 years ago today published in London by Secker & Warburg, then five days later in New York, 1984 struck a chord in the Free World, a transatlantic alliance that, over the last two decades, had experienced the rise of totalitarian regimes. 

The dystopian fantasy from George Orwell took the real nightmares through which people had just lived to another level entirely: a world divided into three “spheres” (much as Orwell had feared that Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were creating at the Teheran Conference in WWII). The three slogans in today’s “Quote of the Day” were carved into the walls of the “Ministry of Truth” in one of these “spheres,” Oceania.

During the years when the Soviet Union wrongly appeared to be not only on the march but unstoppable, 1984 was considered a spot-on critique of how such dictatorships could come to exercise complete tyranny of thought over the individual’s mind. 

Four decades later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defiance flung by Chinese students at their own aging rulers, the sense of urgency transmitted by Orwell had faded. The year 1984 had passed with no regime possessing anything like the hegemony he had imagined with such terrifying authenticity.

Rather than being an indispensable lever of dictatorship, as in the "telescreen," technology came to be seen as a weapon of defiance, perhaps best symbolized by the TV ad for Apple’s Macintosh. 

Typical of this new way of thinking was the characteristically sunny prediction by ex-President Ronald Reagan, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.” 

How naïve we all were. Not only does the gerontocracy endure in China, but it has used the nation’s vast clout to persuade telecon companies not to push content opposed by the regime. From the flotsam of the USSR has emerged Vladimir Putin, who has applied the disinformation techniques he learned as a KGB officer to the social media, sowing confusion and division in the Western democracies he loathes. 

Even the United States has not proved impervious to the Big Lie that is the ultimate product of Orwell’s ironically named Ministry of Truth. Although the ubiquitous indoctrination that represents the final stage of this ministry’s thought control process has not yet arrived in America, the black arts of propaganda are flourishing in the highest office in the land. 

“Doublethink”—defined, in a penetrating essay on the novel by clinical psychologist Natalie Frank, as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously” —is created by a President who calls climate change “a hoax” but whose company has used the phenomenon to press for constructing a seawall to guard against erosion at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland. 

That denial of what ordinary citizens can see and hear for themselves has been facilitated by adviser Kellyanne Conway coining the phrase “alternative facts” to justify the President’s silly insistence on record-setting crowd sizes for his inauguration; by personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming that “Truth isn’t truth”; and by their boss himself telling a crowd, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

For a novel that took root when Orwell grew enraged over Soviet agents discrediting Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies, then became bleaker as he fell victim, one cold winter on a Scottish island, to TB, 1984 has, not surprisingly, taken on unexpected relevance since January 20, 2017.  When the leaders of a democracy seek to rewrite its past and deny its present, they imperil its future.

For the citizenry manipulated by such leaders, it is all too sadly the case that “Ignorance is Strength.”

Quote of the Day (Joe Koehane, on ‘The Art of the Absurd Lie’)

“The art of the absurd lie rests on the liar’s ability to issue a statement so dumb or outrageous that it cannot be countered by a thinking individual. The intended result is to get you, the deceived, so frustrated and angry that the liar looks sane and forthright in comparison.” —Joe Koehane, “The Inanity Defense,” Boston Magazine, October 2008

The source of this quote is an article from a decade ago. The current political scene, of course, surpasses anything Koehane could ever have imagined then. It’s so obvious where the pollution of truth is primarily coming from that I don’t even have to offer a name, right?

Well, okay, just a hint. It’s the same leader who told the British tabloid The Sun, “You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party. Beating Lincoln. I beat our Honest Abe.”

How fascinating, since polling didn’t even exist when Abraham Lincoln was around. Not that this individual (or--further hint!--"Individual 1") will ever be mentioned in the same breath as "Honest Abe" when it comes to integrity, let alone grace of expression, management of subordinates, or respect for those who disagree with him.

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on ‘Incitements to Forsake Truth’)

“There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are to be avoided, and so many present gratifications obtained, by craft and delusion, that very few of those who are much entangled in life have spirit and constancy sufficient to support them in the steady practice of open veracity." —English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784), Rambler #96 (February 16, 1751)

(Portrait of Dr. Johnson by his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds.)

Quote of the Day (Strategist Arthur Finkelstein, on ‘The Most Overwhelming Fact of Politics’)

“The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know.  In politics, it's what you perceive to be true that's true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true. This is a very difficult concept for people who are rational, but for those of us who are engaged in politics, it has become the norm. ... if I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true even though you haven't a clue whether I'm telling the truth or not. That is the way politicians behave and a good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he tells you a few things that are not true because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue.”— Republican Party political strategist Arthur Finkelstein (1945-2017), in an address to a conservative free market private college in Prague in May 2011, quoted in Sam Roberts, “Arthur Finkelstein, Guru of Conservative Politics and Strategy, Dies at 71,” The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2017