RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) Starting in the 1940s, “Truth or Consequences” was a popular American radio program that asked contestants questions and when they didn’t give the right answers (usually), they had to face the “consequences”. These, typically, involved having to perform some contrived stunt that made them look silly in front of the audience, giving everyone a good laugh.
The show lasted almost four decades; a gentle weekly reminder that not telling the truth had consequences. If only today’s truth were so inconsequential and the consequences so enjoyable and harmless.
Observing the recent political scene here in Brazil and in the US brings this back to mind and makes this gringo wonder whether we have all become so totally inured to lies big and small that we hardly notice them, and they appear to have little or no consequences.
The 29 people killed on May 6 during the police raid in Rio’s Jacarezinho favela, the deadliest police operation in the city’s history, were described by Bolsonaro’s Vice President, Gen. Hamilton Mourão without presenting any evidence whatever, as “gang members”, better dead than alive.
Because the victims were mostly poor, black, and mixed-race, any “truth” will no doubt be buried along with them. Police violence is a way of solidifying the boundary between the privileged and the marginalized: the privileged – who control the truth – seldom suffer any consequences.
That politicians make promises they don’t intend to keep is as old as history.
Bolsonaro is particularly willing to say or do anything that crosses his mind and fact-checking (the truth) appears to have no consequences. His recent seven-page letter on the environment to U.S. President Joe Biden is filled with lies, exaggerations, and distorts facts according to the highly reliable environmentalist website ‘fakebook’:
“The text makes reference to nonexistent forest credits, and to a goal that the government itself has scrapped…The president claimed, as his own, results that had been achieved by environmental management during the PT administrations, omitted the environmental dismantling carried out by his own minister Ricardo Salles, and committed himself to a goal of reducing deforestation that his own administration had deleted from the commitment made to the UN under the Paris Agreement.”
The existential battle between lies and the truth in the US has escalated to the point where it seriously threatens the future of the country and its historic democracy. The consequences of the end of truth as the accepted currency of common belief are devastating.
As I have written before, the expression ‘Big Lie’ – that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and in fact won by Donald Trump – has now been kidnapped by Trump supporters, who have flipped it to label as ‘Big Liars’ anyone who dares to believe that the election was not rigged; moreover, the insurrectionist attack January 6th on the US capitol either didn’t happen at all, or was staged by Democrats to embarrass the ex-president.
Liz Cheney, the third highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, was purged from her leadership position this past week simply because she would not go along with the big lie. She paid the consequences of telling the truth. As she said in an interview, “failure to have truth win out over this falsehood undermines belief in our democratic system and that’s an ongoing danger. We have had a collapse of truth in this country.”
That is not hyperbole. As the NY Times commented: “To be a leader in today’s G.O.P. you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our Republic: the integrity of our election… What kind of deformed party will such dynamic produce? A party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and everyone after that.”
That’s a profoundly serious consequence when upwards of 70% of Republicans believe this totally unsupported election fraud lie and yelled ‘bravo’ to Ms. Cheney’s demise. In the false name of ‘fixing’ the ‘rigged’ election system, more than 43 states have already proposed or enacted new laws which will undermine future fair elections, the bedrock of any democracy.
Critic Charles Blow wrote: “Democracy cannot exist in a society in which nearly half the participants have abandoned it, a lie is elevated to the position of truth, participation becomes the thing being poisoned.”
The collapse of truth will not be easily repaired, nor is there any easy antidote to the poison of non-participation in free and fair elections. This is especially true when the U.S. Congress is populated by the likes of Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) who claimed: “if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit”. ‘Normal tourist visits’ don’t leave five people dead and more than one hundred, mostly Capitol police, injured.
While Congress has finally agreed on a bipartisan commission to investigate and report on the insurrection, just achieving unity on the make-up and brief for the commission was a major battle.
Hopefully, this commission will resurrect the truth, and let us clearly see the consequences we have and are still suffering from ignoring it.