Arguably the most preposterous exercise in biographical writing was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, a 1999 book by Reagan’s official biographer, Edmund Morris, which turned out to be a perplexing Ragtime-esque mashup of fact and fantasy, featuring a fictional narrator who is twenty-eight years older than the real Morris and who was supposedly saved from drowning in his youth by the future president. Instead of using his extraordinary access to a sitting president and his personal papers to create a detailed portrait of the fortieth president (or to grapple with important issues like Iran-Contra or the end of the Cold War), Morris gave readers cheesy descriptions of his fictional narrator and his fictional family and his fictional or semi-fictional hopes and dreams. Morris took this approach, he explained, because he realized he didn’t “understand the first thing” about his subject—an abdication of the biographer’s most basic duty—and because of his own artistic aspirations. “I want to make literature out of Ronald Reagan,” he declared. He also described his use of a fictionalized narrator as “an advance in biographical honesty,” a reminder to the reader of the subjective element involved in all writing.
This was an argument that echoed the self-serving reasoning of Janet Malcolm, who suggested in The Silent Woman, her highly partisan 1994 book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, that all biographers share her own disdain for fairness and objectivity—a disingenuous assertion, given that she made no effort to carefully weigh or evaluate material in her book but instead wrote a kind of long fan letter to Hughes, extolling his literary gifts, his physical attractiveness, his “helpless honesty.” She wrote about her “feeling of tenderness toward Hughes,” and how reading one of his letters, she felt her “identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer.”
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The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disenfranchised to be heard. But it’s also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution in schools. “Teach both,” some argued. Others said, “Teach the controversy.”
A variation on this “both sides” argument was employed by President Trump when he tried to equate people demonstrating against white supremacy with the neo-Nazis who had converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. There were “some very fine people on both sides,” Trump declared. He also said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction—phrases like “many sides,” “different perspectives,” “uncertainties,” “multiple ways of knowing.” As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, right-wing think tanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science (be it the reality of climate change or the hazards of asbestos or secondhand smoke or acid rain) have employed a strategy that was first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
The strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a tactic that’s been used by Trump and his Republican allies to defend policies (on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall) that run counter to both expert evaluation and national polls.
What Oreskes and Conway call the “Tobacco Strategy” got an assist, they argued, from elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve.” This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth telling, willful neutrality with accuracy; caving to pressure from right-wing interest groups to present “both sides”; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints—even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcast network’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion” on the subject of man-made climate change. Or, as a headline in The Telegraph put it, “BBC Staff Told to Stop Inviting Cranks on to Science Programmes.”
In a speech on press freedom, Christiane Amanpour addressed this issue in the context of media coverage of the 2016 presidential race, saying,
Like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate. It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.
We cannot continue the old paradigm—let’s say like over global warming, where 99.9 percent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.
I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.
I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.
4
THE VANISHING OF REALITY
Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why?
Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality.
—PHILIP K. DICK, “THE ELECTRIC ANT”
“Surreal” and “chaos” have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, at a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN.
Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the 1960s, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth wrote of American reality, “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complained, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise…”
Roth’s sense that actuality was exceeding fiction writers’ imagination (and throwing up real-life figures like Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn who were the envy of any novelist) would be echoed more than half a century later by writers of satire and spy thrillers in the Trump era. And his observation that novelists were having difficulty dealing imag
inatively with a world they felt to be confounding helps explain why journalism—particularly what Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism—began eclipsing fiction in capturing what life was like in the 1960s, as the Esquire anthology aptly titled Smiling Through the Apocalypse (featuring classic magazine pieces by such writers as Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Gay Talese) attested.
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Politicians had always spun reality, but television—and later the internet—gave them new platforms on which to prevaricate. When the Republican strategist Lee Atwater observed in the 1980s that “perception is reality,” he was bluntly articulating an insight about human psychology that Homer well knew when he immortalized Odysseus as a wily trickster, adept at deception and disguise. But Atwater’s cold-blooded use of that precept in using wedge issues to advance the GOP’s southern strategy—and to create the infamous Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential campaign—injected mainstream American politics with an alarming strain of win-at-all-costs Machiavellianism using mass media as a delivery system.
Nearly three decades later, Trump would cast immigrants in the role of Willie Horton, and turning the clock back further, he would exchange dog-whistle racism for the more overt racism and rhetoric of George Wallace. At the same time, he instinctively grasped that the new internet-driven landscape and voters’ growing ignorance about issues made it easier than ever to play to voters’ fears and resentments by promoting sticky, viral narratives that served up alternate realities. He also amped up efforts to discredit journalism as “fake news,” attacking reporters as “enemies of the people”—a chilling term once used by Lenin and Stalin.
It wasn’t just that Trump lied reflexively and shamelessly, but that those hundreds upon hundreds of lies came together to create equally false story lines that appealed to people’s fears. Depicting America as a country reeling from crime (when, in fact, the crime rate was experiencing historic lows—less than half what it was at its peak in 1991). A country beset by waves of violent immigrants (when, in fact, studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than U.S.-born citizens). Immigrants who are a burden to the country and who should be vetted more carefully (when, in fact, thirty-one of seventy-eight American Nobel Prizes since 2000 were won by immigrants, and immigrants and their kids have helped found an estimated 60 percent of the top U.S. tech companies, worth nearly four trillion dollars). In short, Trump argued, a nation in deep trouble and in need of a savior.
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Long before he entered politics, Trump was using lies as a business tool. He claimed that his flagship building, Trump Tower, is sixty-eight floors high, when, in fact, it’s only fifty-eight floors high. He also pretended to be a PR man named John Barron or John Miller to create a sock puppet who could boast about his—Trump’s—achievements. He lied to puff himself up, to generate business under false pretenses, and to play to people’s expectations. Everything was purely transactional; all that mattered was making the sale.
He spent years as a real-estate developer and reality-TV star, promiscuously branding himself (Trump Hotels, Trump Menswear, Trump Natural Spring Water, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Home Collection), and like most successful advertisers—and successful propagandists—he understood that the frequent repetition of easy-to-remember and simplistic taglines worked to embed merchandise (and his name) in potential customers’ minds. Decades before handing out “MAGA” hats at his rallies, he’d become an expert at staging what the historian Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-events”—that is, events “planned, planted, or incited” primarily “for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.”
Boorstin’s 1962 book, The Image—which would inform the work of myriad writers from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord, to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff—uncannily foresaw reality TV decades before the Kardashians or the Osbournes or any number of desperate housewives actually showed up in our living rooms. For that matter, he anticipated the rise of someone very much like Donald J. Trump: a celebrity known, in Boorstin’s words, for his “well-knownness” (and who would even host a show called The Celebrity Apprentice).
Boorstin’s descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P. T. Barnum—who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)—will sound uncannily familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed “prince of humbugs” whose “great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived” as long as it was being entertained.
Much the way images were replacing ideals, Boorstin wrote in The Image, the idea of “credibility” was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.” And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, “the socially rewarded art” became “that of making things seem true”; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early 1960s were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue.
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Baudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today’s media-centric culture people have come to prefer the “hyperreal”—that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland—to the boring, everyday “desert of the real.”
Artists like Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Federico Fellini grappled with similar themes, creating stories in which the borders between the real and the virtual, the actual and the imagined, the human and the post-human blur, overlap, even collapse. In the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges describes “a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters and geometricians” who invent an unknown planet named Tlön: they conjure its geography, its architecture, its systems of thinking. Bits and pieces of Tlön start surfacing in the real world: an artifact here, a description there, and things speed up around 1942; eventually, the narrator notes, the teachings of Tlön have spread so widely that the history he learned as a child has been obliterated and replaced by “a fictitious past.”
Borges drew direct parallels between the power of fictions about Tlön to insinuate themselves into human consciousness and the power of deadly political ideologies based on lies to infect entire nations; both, he suggested, provide internally consistent narratives that appeal to people hungering to make sense of the world. “Reality gave ground on more than one point,” Borges wrote. “The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we will never completely perceive. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.”
Thomas Pynchon’s novels explore similar themes—more relevant than ever in a world suffering from information overload. Reeling from a kind of spiritual vertigo, his characters wonder whether the paranoiacs have it right—that there are malign conspiracies and hidden agendas connecting all the dots. Or whether the nihilists are onto something—that there is no signal in the noise, only chaos and randomness. “If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” he wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
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In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis create
d an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title (which also seems to allude to Baudrillard) was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 U.S. election on the BBC’s iPlayer platform, Curtis says in voice-over narration that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.”
Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix—in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial)—members of the alt-right and some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about “red-pilling the normies,” which means converting people to their cause. In other words, selling their inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat, and men have been oppressed by women.
Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities—having accepted run-of-the-mill anti-feminism—are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of anti-Semitism.”
The Death of Truth Page 5