Lying in Plain Sight

There are big lies, small lies, and lying in plain sight.  We look at history where decision were based on lies, except all the participants knew it was fiction.  

Transcript

Lying in Plain Sight

“Lying is the most cowardly act there is because it takes two to lie: one to tell the untruth and one to know it’s a lie and support it.”

Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

 George Washington

“It is easier to believe the lie that provides benefit than the truth that provides hardship.” Okay the exact wording of this one was me but It is a a rewrite of Paul of Tarsus’ Letter to the Thessalonians, so no, not ready to put myself into the opening quote section - yet!

During a great conservation with Josh Lewis on his Saving Elephants podcast, we discussed the nature of Edmund Burke’s view of history:

“In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons…and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury.”

History can unite a group by providing a shared sense of culture, ideals, and historical touchstones. So what is the differentiation between a common historical culture and touchstones, such as our Independence Day on July 4th, propaganda that utilizes the big lie, and a lie that is clearly understood by all the participants but held forth regardless? 

Before we get into these big thoughts, I will provide an overview of tennis. Yes, tennis; though I am not a young man, I refuse to adhere to the growing wave of pickleball and stay with a real sport. Rock concerts are simple. You buy a seat and sit there. Or you can buy a floor pass and stand there if you like being pressed by sweaty people. Most sporting events are similar. Tennis tournaments are different. Not to get into the vagaries of seating at such venues, but tennis has day and night seats. The day seats are not necessarily the day. If a series of matches go into the night, the purchasers still keep their seats until a specific slate of matches is concluded, regardless of time. What is funny and irritating is the night people, having bulldozed past dazed volunteer security, begin to take seats once the sun starts to set, creating two sets of folks vying for one set of seats.   

One such gentleman said he was a season ticket holder; thus, it was his seat. This is impossible because, with tennis, venues are played once a year. There is no season. He then claimed it was his in-law’s seat and pointed to two women as proof. Except we saw his wife introduce herself to the two women. When the day holders booted out both him, his wife, and the women, the pairs went in separate ways, another lie. It is a simple strategy. Please take what you want, then, when challenged, lie through your stinking teeth and dare someone to challenge it. If you fail, oh well. But if you succeed, garner the winnings and pat yourself on the back for ingenuity. The fabulous end to this petty and sordid tale is when the day holders returned; we surrounded these two-bit hucksters, preparing to throw them out ourselves. In the end, there was justice. People who paid for the seats sat in the darn seats. Crazy, I know. 

The following historical stories do not lie in the vein that the New Deal solved the Recession, the Dreyfus Affair, or the Zimmerman Telegraph. Those were all lies believed to be accurate, at least by the people of the times of those events and, in the case of the New Deal, leftists of today. 

Instead, the following are lies that everyone knew were fictional but went along with them because they fit with the desires of the people upon which the lie was being perpetrated.  

One of my favorites of the Lies in Plain Sight was Alexander of Macedon and his invasion of the Persian Empire. 

Always savvy about people and their motivations, Alexander knew trying to rule Greece long-term would be problematic as city-state after city-state would resist him. So, either lay waste to Greece or provide a uniting cause. 

So Alexander framed his campaign against the Persian Achaemenid Empire as a patriotic retaliation for Persia’s failed invasion of the Greek mainland a century earlier. What he conveniently omitted from the narrative, and a fact the Greeks would have been fully aware of, was that Macedon was a vassal of the Persians and willingly assisted them against Athens and Sparta. The reality was a follow-the-money theme. Of course, the Greeks knew this more about Alexander and his ambitions rather than some patriotic cause, but because Alexander’s ego was leading them to one of the wealthiest Empires on Earth, what is a minor fib compared to that?  

We see things through the eyes of the Greeks and later Macedonians. Hence, the Hellenization of the East that occurred under Alexander’s successor generals is a great thing, right? 

For the most part, the Achaemenids brought 200 years of peace and relative prosperity to lands that had been warring for centuries after Alexander’s Empire split into three parts that were constantly at war. 

Later, it will split again and again. 

Great for the descendants of Alexander’s generals. Not so much for the average person dealing with the constant warfare.  

After nearly 80 years of civil war, one man emerged victorious at the end of the Roman Republic. Octavian, formerly Octavious and soon to be Augustus, had learned the lesson of his illustrious great uncle Julius Caesar. Instead of declaring an end to the Republic, Octavian lied and told the Romans that he was instead restoring the Republic. Of course, he had a few provisos. He would keep the title of Tribune of the Plebs, a convenient role for introducing and enacting legislation. He later took on the role of Pontifex Maximus to manage the Roman Religion, though this role was not odd as this role was one for life. Roman magistrates could be Pontifex Maximus and any other role, including senior ones such as Praetor and Consul. What was unique about Octavian’s position was that he was Tribune, Pontifex Maximus, and governor of Hispania, Gaul, and Syria simultaneously. Not coincidentally, the provinces with the largest Roman armies. Finally, he took the title of Princeps or first citizen as a permanent designation. 

For a time in Roman History, there was a Princip Senatus or a ceremonial role as the leader of the Senate. None of these positions in and of themselves was odd. But combined into one person was unprecedented. And though history calls Octavian the first Roman Emperor, that was a title he would have eschewed. Emperor derives from Imperator or a victor on a field of battle, something that Roman troops would declare of a victorious general. But it was not seen in Octavian’s time as a designation of office. Octavian kept all the trappings of the Roman Republican government, though he and everyone around him understood it was all fiction. 

He was Rome’s undisputed ruler, and bad things occurred to those who challenged his supremacy.  

Most historians consider the sermon preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to have been the spark that fueled a wave of military campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. Considered at the time to be divinely sanctioned, these campaigns, involving often ruthless battles, are known as the Crusades. At their core was a desire for access to shrines associated with the life and ministry of Jesus, above all, the Holy Sepulcher, the church in Jerusalem said to contain the tomb of Christ. Absolution from sin and eternal glory were promised to the Crusaders. But was this the real reason so many went to the Holy Land? We have lost the original text of Urban’s speech but have many contemporary renderings of it so we can reconstruct enough, including this inciteful passage: 

Your land is shut in on all sides by the sea and mountains and is too thickly populated. There is little wealth here, and the soil scarcely yields enough to support you. On this account, you kill and devour each other, carry on war, and mutually destroy each other. Let your hatred and quarrels cease, your civil wars end, and all your dissensions stop. Set out on the road to the Holy Sepulchre, take the land from those wicked people, and make it your own. That land which, as the Scripture says, is flowing with milk and honey. 

What do the following Medieval Popes have in common? Foul play. John X (928), allegedly smothered with a pillow. John XII (964) allegedly murdered by the jealous husband of the woman with whom he was in bed. Benedict VI (974), was strangled, and John XIV (984), died either by starvation, ill-treatment, or direct murder. These Popes lived a hundred years before Urban so much for the divine nature of the Pope or medieval religious respect. I am not saying that the chance for salvation was not a factor in the Crusades. Later Crusaders such as Richard I of England or Louis IX of France were not there to garner wealth; quite the contrary, given the cost of a crusade. But the 1st Crusade, without which success the others may have never happened, was not about absolution but a bunch of second sons and poorer nobles trying to better their fate. Urban knew this, as did the Western European nobles. But for a medieval pope talking about the holy land, a speech entirely around something like a timeshare infomercial would have been bad form.   

Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup famously told Tom Cruise’s Daniel Caffey, “You cannot handle the truth.” And in some ways, he is correct. In the face of aging populations, our entitlement spending will only be solved in three ways: raise taxes, cut benefits, and raise the eligibility age from its current 65 years old. When politicians say we can print more money, reduce governmental waste, or increase the GDP, and thus, more tax revenue, they are not exactly lying. If all three happened, my three recommendations would not be necessary. But printing money will increase inflation and thus a hidden tax raise. There is not enough waste in the budget to cover the whole deficit. What President of Congress would not already have done everything to increase GDP, which is almost certainly intertwined with their personal success? Any American who desires to spend between 10-20 minutes of research, equipped with a 5th grader’s math skills, can figure all of this out. 

Unlike Octavian, our politicians are not exactly lying; they must fully tell the truth. They know that, like Jessup’s belief about Caffey, they are not ready to hear the truth.  

Trump does a variation of this lying in plain sight, but only partially. He is not telling us that the sky is green and the grass is blue. It is a variation on lying that just so happens to mean he always emerges victorious. There is never a loss. If he wins, he wins. If he loses, the game is rigged, so he won but was stolen. The issue is not about his temerity but that he gets away with it. 

His original success was based on his father’s real estate connections that, in the 1980s, made Trump a billionaire. March 1988: The New York Times and Forbes Trump is worth $3 billion when he buys the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan for $390 million. Today, it is estimated at $2.6 billion. He would claim closer to ten. This only matters because one of his defender’s favorite talking points is about his business career’s brilliance. In the 1980s, he made savvy deals based on those aforementioned connections. In the intervening 40 years, his worth has dropped as names such as Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg, or even North Dakota Governor and Billionaire Doug Burgum, have grown a zillionfold. $2.6 billion is good for capitalism, but it is a variation on the truth to say that Trump is a business genius. 

And was the greatest president of the 21st century, as Vivek Ramaswamy recently averred at the first GOP 2024 nomination debate?  

Part of that depends on how one defines greatness. Suppose character is a part of that claim, then no. During his career, he has been in out-of-business bankruptcy four times. He has been divorced twice, with both episodes involving his own infidelities. 

He has boasted of grabbing women’s privates because he is “a star.”  

Suppose it is about identifying and developing talent. In that case, it is hard to put a finger on a single operative in his white house who emerged better for the experience from the low of Steve Bannon to the decorated, once highly respected General John West, whom Trump said had very little brain.  

If it is based on the party’s success since his elevation, he has dumped the GOP into the garbage heap with a single win in the past eight years. Yet he is the leader of the GOP primary by 40 points. Do tens of millions of his followers really believe that Trump lost the election? Do you think nefarious forces were afoot swinging the election to Joe Biden? We are a nation of 330 million, so there is plenty of room for those who absolutely believe the election was stolen, just as there are those who think Elvis is still alive and living in an Oregon commune with Jim Morrison even though Elvis would now be 87. I think many do, but the majority? It is convenient for them to maintain this belief because, just like Trump, the alternative is that he is a loser and that they backed a loser. One eyewitness has Trump looking at a TV and saying, “I cannot believe I lost to this guy,” so he does not believe.  

 There were over 60 lawsuits filed, and there is no evidence to prove that voter fraud changed the election. But here is the cleverness of his “stop the steal” program. Every election will have shenanigans, and 2020 was no exception in the COVID era. Because of the virus, mail-in ballots were far more prodigious, but that is a different argument. The Democrats were equipped to take advantage of mail-in more than the Republicans, so using COVID to force mail-in ballots was beneficial. But that is like saying that constantly fouling a bad free throw shooter, as was done in the NBA when Shaquille Oneal roamed the hardcourts, was cheating. It was not. It was ugly and terrible basketball, but not the same as, let’s say, spiking Oneal’s Gatorade with turbo lax and thus removing him from the game. Okay, I just got a vision of a 350-pound Oneal after Turbo Lax’s effects, but I did this to myself.  

When the GOP primary electorate hears that Democrats can win elections by cheating, evidence to the contrary, it is not through a comprehensive study of detailed circumspection but a feral calculation. And the real work of studying candidates or learning issues becomes the stuff for losers. 

For a party that rightly condemned the left for years of giving their constituents excuses for bad culture and choices, it is startling and dismaying to see the same argument on the right. 

 When Barack Obama would say of Republicans that “they want dirty water and dirty air,” it was his typical specious straw man argument. The concept of over-regulating industries is one debate, but I guarantee that no single GOP politician was part of the “let’s put filth into lakes and river system” caucus. Obama, the former Constitution professor who did not know the Constitution was lying in plain sight and was a master at it. The GOP is learning from the wrong professors.