The Demagogue’s Dilemma

The forty-fifth president of the United States is a man of few words. Literally. That much should not be considered a flaw. In fact, it can be a wonderful gift. But when you are a man that knows few words you better choose them wisely. By his own admission, one of 45’s favorite words is “hyperbole”. By his followers’ admonition, they love him no matter what he says because “he tells it like it is.” By logical omission, the world has not seen irony like this before.

Hyperbole is at essence an exaggeration. How large or small of an exaggeration depends on your appetite for the unadulterated truth. Either way, it is a distortion that contains elements of truth at the expense of tarnishing it. We may not initially recognize distortion, but if we look closer we will find it: it is the stuff that dreams are made of. It is in our fantasies and in our painkillers. Distortion is Dr. Feelgood. On the surface it is the rose-colored glasses we wear on a dreary day. But in its heart of darkness, it is the “Code Red” ordered by Colonel Jessup when we can’t handle the truth. Not all of it anyway. But filtered, medicated… distorted? Oh yeah. We want it on that wall... we need it on that wall.

If you’re lucky, a part of you may sense there’s a fair amount of distortion in hyperbole. But you sanitize it as a “casualty”. You reconcile it as a small price to pay, in an ideological war over your god-given right to believe in whatever you damn please. 

In a hyperbolic society, winning becomes everything. It consumes everything. Hyperbole is the friendly fire of your convictions. You accept that it may take down even those whom “you have nothing against”, but it’s better than the alternative. At least according to your fears. Because that twisted strand in our DNA, the one that produces fear, sees losing as the first tumble to a fate worse than death: the loss of freedom.

Losing starts when you are captured, whether figuratively or literally. If you are captured, even if you are one of the good guys, you instantly become a loser. According to the book of winning, if you were captured you really did not know how to win in the first place - otherwise you would have never been captured. It is simple, circular logic. A Machiavellian deal maker, like a good chess player, is moves-ahead of the captured loser. If he knows there’s a good chance he will be captured, the deal maker will sell his soul to avoid the fight.

Distortion carries one more side-effect that we don’t often question, much less associate with hyperbole: raising walls. It turns out we don’t just raise walls to keep people out. We raise them because we do not want others to see who we really are. Serial winners love to build walls around their promised land, purposely excluding aspects of the truth they do not like.

There are many proverbial forks-in-the road throughout our lifetime. But the sum of the crossroads that force you to choose between truth or hyperbole can amount to the Via Crucis of our lives. The truth can be cruel, painful, scary. It can trigger either a tipping point or breaking point. It is at that juncture that you forge your destiny: stick with the undistorted truth at the risk of great sacrifice, or cherry-pick it in the name of winning. There is no middle ground there. One way or another the mighty universe could not care less about your fears and perceptions. It does not see winning as truth, or truth as winning. It’s not that the two don’t overlap, of course they sometimes do. But the tragedy of human ignorance is that they don’t overlap as much as we think they do. Guys like Hitler spent years “winning”. But it is fool’s consolation to say that guys like Hitler always lose in the end. Try telling that to the millions tortured or massacred. “In the end” is an optical illusion, a mirage. If guys like Hitler always lose in the end, history would not have a propensity to repeat itself so goddamn much. Ad nauseam. 

If it’s meaningful consolation you want, consider the fact that the universe will never distort the truth. It can’t, because it’s one and the same. Our existential fork in the road is ironically simple: seek the truth at the expense of some loss, or scurry on to the promised land of winners. A safe house were you are promised protection from losing. A Pleasantville surrounded by walls made of amputated truths. 

As someone who is not a fan of distortion, I‘m forced to pronounce myself a serial loser. I have already lost much, though nowhere near as much as many others. Oh I have won much too. But regardless of my net wins and losses, I’m forced to accept that longing for the unadulterated truth doesn’t make me morally superior. I’m forced to realize that the moment I see truth-seeking as the “winning” path is the moment I’ve wandered off to a dead-end.

That’s where the tip-or-break point comes in. If you’ve managed not to break, congratulations: you have earned a rare choice in life. A chance to come closer to the truth than most mere mortals ever do.

I choose the losers. The ones that were crucified. The ones that were captured. The ones that gave more than they took, which makes them net losers. I choose the ones that don’t trickle, or worship the past. I choose the present. I choose the science of real, not the art of the deal. 

I choose the risk of losing, even though I too attended demagogue school. I choose it knowing I will never fully grasp the whole truth in my lifetime. I choose risk knowing that I will continue to win and lose my way through mortality, with no option for permanence either way. And therein lies the demagogue’s dilemma: if the illusion is good enough, is the price of real victory worth it?

...

To A Tennis Player Love Means Nothing

September 4, 1957: Elizabeth Eckford, "The Little Rock Nine"

As someone who may have smashed a tennis racquet or two, I have an insight into the demons that have tormented the likes of Serena Williams and Andre Agassi. It has zero to do with social injustice, but it sure makes for a convenient distraction from accountability. 

I believe some people are turning Serena Williams into a martyr for vicarious reasons: blaming their own demons on some distant social injustice. There have been clear cases throughout history of toxic sexism, plenty to choose from. There are blatant examples of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia in our lifetime. Knee-jerking any and every dispute into a sexist, racist or xenophobic cause is emotionally unintelligent. 

Defending the angst of an ego-bruised, multi-millionaire athlete as if we were reliving the suffering endured by Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock or Rosa Parks in Montgomery is in itself toxic. Serena Williams’ could not hold a candle to a brave black girl one September morning back in 1957, as she carried her schoolbooks through an angry white mob. A mob that needed an entire national guard to stop a girl armed with only a notebook. An amazing grace of courage so that Serena Williams could one day make millions of dollars and hobnob with the top 1% of the world.

Schrödinger’s Democracy

When the US Republican Party embraced the racially inconvenienced and outraged Southern Democrats in the 1960’s, little did we know that the great party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan was selling its soul for thirty pieces of silver. It was slow cooking, but it finally boiled over in 2016. Trump’s democratic coup became transparent within minutes of his election: his was the 5th cancellation of the popular vote in US history. 

But unlike the previous ones, Trump’s electoral college victory saw an unprecedented number of cancelled popular votes: more than 2.8 million. By comparison, the previous highest cancellation was in 2000, with less than 0.5 million votes eliminated by the electoral college. It finally made a lot of Americans take notice after November of 2016: what is this thing called the Electoral College? And more importantly, why does it seem to favor a party riddled with racism and xenophobia?

Those questions should have been asked a long time ago. You would figure that after the Civil War - a bloodbath that claimed the most American lives of any war to date - SOMEONE would have said, “Hey, has everyone forgotten that this Electoral College thing is directly based on slavery math??“ 

Ah, the irony of defeat. The South actually benefited from the Electoral College math, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when their former slaves went from counting as 3/5 human to being whole. “Three-fifths human”. Let that sink in for a moment. The founders of our enlightened democracy had signed their names on one of humanity’s most influential documents, a majestic declaration that did not stutter when it stated the following words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That all men are created equal. Perhaps Napoleon & Snowball the pigs snuck into Independence Hall one fateful summer night, and upon the freshly inked declaration scribbled the words, “but some are only three-fifths human”. Or perhaps this was to be a paradoxical experiment in democracy. One worthy of inspiring Erwin Schrödinger to come up with one of quantum physics most famous thought experiments: “Schrödinger’s Cat”.  In a Schrödinger Democracy, it is possible for ALL men to be created equal, while SOME are simultaneously only three-fifths equal. 

In the aftermath of the Civil War, having lost their Schrödinger Way of Life, the South figured out a way to disenfranchise blacks for the next one-hundred years. With defeats like these who needs victories.

One-hundred years later puts us in 1965, the year after the last of the Civil Rights Acts was signed and sealed by the federal government. What was supposed to be the beginning of a brave new post-Schrödinger Democracy turned out to be, apparently, the year America ceased to be great. It was the year a political mass exodus began, when those who hated the slave-freeing Republican Party now had a new party to hate: the Black-enfranchising  Democratic Party. 

The mother of all ironies is that the party that did so much for this country, one that four-score and seven years after the birth of our nation called out the illegitimate use of the word “freedom” in our Declaration of Independence, was the same party that in 2016 set us back to 1963. 

Mystery solved. We now know what that doggone, dog-whistled year was when America was last great. In a surreal back-to-dystopia twist, Nineteen Sixty-Three was to be the last year when discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin was a God-given right. 

Let this now be self-evident, as we move on and try to make sense of this fine clusterfuck we’ve gotten ourselves into: that what could otherwise be a universal beacon of true greatness on earth, our American Democracy’s tragic flaw boils down to the dumbest of all human fears - the boogeyman of skin color.

It’s hard to judge the distance between brink and precipice - it’s not what we do best as humans. Which brings many of us to our current state of discomfort: how far or how close are we? Either way, here’s a little trail of breadcrumbs our founders left for us. It almost immediately follows their aforementioned words of wisdom that all men are created equal:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...”

Are we there yet?