The Death of Truth
Page 12
2. THE NEW CULTURE WARS
The death of objectivity: David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 75. See also Michiko Kakutani, “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2006.
“a kaleidoscope of information”: David Foster Wallace, “Host: Deep into the Mercenary World of Take-No-Prisoners Political Talk Radio,” Atlantic, Apr. 2005.
The Republican Party: Stephen Collinson and Jeremy Diamond, “Trump Again at War with ‘Deep State’ Justice Department,” CNN Politics, Jan. 2, 2018.
“We’re trying to disrupt”: Donald J. Trump, “Remarks at a Rally at Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wisconsin,” Sept. 28, 2016. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119201.
“failed and corrupt political establishment”: Ben Illing, “Trump Ran as a Populist. He’s Governing as an Elitist. He’s Not the First,” Vox, June 23, 2017.
“Look, I read postmodernist”: Andrew Marantz, “Trolls for Trump,” New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2016.
“seen as no more than”: Christopher Butler, Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15.
“resisted the cultural changes”: Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 285.
“the final form of human government”: Ishaan Tharoor, “Fukuyama’s ‘Future of History’: Is Liberal Democracy Doomed?,” Time, Feb. 8, 2012.
“with populist and nationalist forces”: Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2017, freedomhouse.org.
“a slow erosion”: Ishaan Tharoor, “The Man Who Declared the ‘End of History’ Fears for Democracy’s Future,” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2017.
And Trump, as both candidate: Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy, “The 425 People, Places, and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2018.
Russian trolls used an impostor Facebook account: Donie O’Sullivan, “Russian Trolls Created Facebook Events Seen by More Than 300,000 Users,” CNN, Jan. 26, 2018.
“all these things”: William J. Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Evangelicals Defend Trump’s Alleged Marital Infidelity. But His Infidelity to America Is Worse,” NBC News, Jan. 30, 2018.
Tony Perkins, president: Jennifer Hansler, “Conservative Evangelical Leader: Trump Gets a ‘Mulligan’ on His Behavior,” CNN, Jan. 23, 2018.
“commitment was understood”: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 314.
“it is not only futile”: Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Knopf, 1994), 135.
“knowledge about the past”: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 8.
“The postmodern view fit well”: Shawn Otto, The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2016), 180–81.
“Atmospheric CO2 is the same”: Ibid., 177.
“What is peculiar to our own age”: George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” A Collection of Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 199.
“the potential to alter”: Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993), loc. 19, Kindle. See also Michiko Kakutani, “When History Is a Casualty,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 1993.
As David Lehman: Michiko Kakutani, “The Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 1991.
De Man, a professor at Yale: Jon Wiener, “Deconstructing de Man,” Nation, Jan. 9, 1988; Robert Alter, “Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud,” New Republic, Apr. 5, 2014; Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Liveright, 2014).
A very different portrait: Barish, Double Life of Paul de Man; Jennifer Schuessler, “Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 2014; Louis Menand, “The de Man Case,” New Yorker, Mar. 24, 2014.
The most shocking news: Lehman, Signs of the Times, 163–64.
“we are determined to forbid”: Ibid., 180.
“Jewish writers have always”: Kakutani, “Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic”; Paul de Man, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” Le Soir, Mar. 4, 1941, reprinted in Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man (New York: Routledge, 2001).
“considerations of the actual”: Kakutani, “Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic.”
More disturbing still: Lehman, Signs of the Times, 137, 158, 234.
“one of detached mockery”: Ibid., 238, 239, 243, 267.
“have to take each word”: David Brunnstrom, “Ahead of Trump Meeting, Abe Told Not to Take Campaign Rhetoric Literally,” Reuters, Nov. 15, 2016.
“You guys took everything”: Jonah Goldberg, “Take Trump Seriously but Not Literally? How, Exactly?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 6, 2016.
3. “MOI” AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY
“Our subjectivity is so completely”: James Mottram, “Spike Jonze Interview: Her Is My ‘Boy Meets Computer’ Movie,” Independent, Jan. 31, 2014.
“ethic of self-preservation”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 51, xiii, 239.
“intense feelings of rage”: Ibid., 36–38.
“remaking, remodeling, elevating”: Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, Aug. 23, 1976.
“the preening self”: Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 315.
“My net worth fluctuates”: David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Trump: A True Story,” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2016; Kiran Khalid, “Trump: I’m Worth Whatever I Feel,” CNNMoney.com, Apr. 21, 2011.
“I believe that he feels”: Scott Horsley, “Trump: Putin Again Denied Interfering in Election and ‘I Really Believe’ He Means It,” The Two-Way, NPR, Nov. 11, 2017.
“I understand your view”: Transcripts, CNN, July 22, 2016, transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1607/22/nday.06.html.
“small private societies”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1990), 215, 319, 318, 321.
Norman Vincent Peale: James Barron, “Overlooked Influences on Donald Trump: A Famous Minister and His Church,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 2016; Tom Gjelten, “How Positive Thinking, Prosperity Gospel Define Donald Trump’s Faith Outlook,” NPR, Aug. 3, 2016.
“Any fact facing us”: Tamara Keith, “Trump Crowd Size Estimate May Involve ‘the Power of Positive Thinking,’ ” NPR, Jan. 22, 2017.
Ayn Rand, also admired: Mackenzie Weinger, “7 Pols Who Praised Ayn Rand,” Politico, Apr. 26, 2012.
over the years, The Fountainhead: Kirsten Powers, “Donald Trump’s ‘Kinder, Gentler’ Version,” USA Today, Apr. 11, 2016.
“highest moral purpose”: Jonathan Freedland, “The New Age of Ayn Rand: How She Won Over Trump and Silicon Valley,” Guardian, Apr. 10, 2017.
“a kind of embarrassment”: Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary, Mar. 1, 1961.
“head out into this wild”: Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” Harper’s, Nov. 1989.
“depends on what the meaning”: “From the Starr Referral: Clinton’s Grand Jury Testimony, Part 4,” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/bctest092198_4.htm.
“the sheer fact of self”: Roth, “Writing American Fiction.”
“wholly fabricated or wildly
embellished”: Kakutani, “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways.”
“most of what”: Laura Barton, “The Man Who Rewrote His Life,” Guardian, Sept. 15, 2006.
“spread in tandem”: Adam Begley, “The I’s Have It: Duke’s ‘Moi’ Critics Expose Themselves,” Lingua Franca, Mar./Apr. 1994.
In her 1996 book: Michiko Kakutani, “Opinion vs. Reality in an Age of Pundits,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1994; Michiko Kakutani, “Fear of Fat as the Bane of Modernism,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 1996.
Personal stories or agendas: Michiko Kakutani, “A Biographer Who Claims a License to Blur Reality,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1999.
“understand the first thing”: Ibid.
“feeling of tenderness”: Michiko Kakutani, “Taking Sides in Polemics over Plath,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 1994; Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (New York: Knopf, 1994), loc. 67, 32, Kindle.
“Teach both,” some argued: Sam Boyd, “Sarah Palin on Teaching Intelligent Design in Schools,” American Prospect, Aug. 29, 2008; Massimo Pigliucci, “Is Sarah Palin a Creationist?,” LiveScience, Sept. 1, 2008.
“Teach the controversy”: John Timmer, “Ohio School District Has ‘Teach the Controversy’ Evolution Lesson Plan,” Ars Technica, May 18, 2016.
“some very fine people”: Rosie Gray, “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides,’ ” Atlantic, Aug. 15, 2017; Mark Landler, “Trump Resurrects His Claim That Both Sides Share Blame in Charlottesville Violence,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2017; Sonam Sheth, “Trump Equates Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with George Washington in Bizarre Press Conference,” Business Insider, Aug. 15, 2017; Dan Merica, “Trump Condemns ‘Hatred, Bigotry, and Violence on Many Sides’ in Charlottesville,” CNN Politics, Aug. 13, 2017.
As Naomi Oreskes: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 6.
“Doubt is our product”: Ibid., 34.
The strategy, essentially, was this: Ibid., 6–7, 217.
the “Tobacco Strategy”: Ibid., 6, 215.
This false equivalence: Alister Doyle, “Scientists Say United on Global Warming, at Odds with Public View,” Reuters, May 15, 2013; NASA, “Scientific Consensus: Earth’s Climate Is Warming,” climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/; Justin Fox, “97 Percent Consensus on Climate Change? It’s Complicated,” Bloomberg, June 15, 2017.
“undue attention to marginal”: David Robert Grimes, “Impartial Journalism Is Laudable. But False Balance Is Dangerous,” Guardian, Nov. 8, 2016.
Or, as a headline: Sarah Knapton, “BBC Staff Told to Stop Inviting Cranks on to Science Programmes,” Telegraph, July 4, 2014.
“Like many people watching”: Christiane Amanpour, speech on receiving the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award, Nov. 22, 2016, cpj.org.
4. THE VANISHING OF REALITY
“Do I want to interfere”: Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant,” in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), Kindle, p. 384 of 467.
at a time when nineteen kids: Christopher Ingraham, “19 Kids Are Shot Every Day in the United States,” Washington Post, June 20, 2017.
“It stupefies, it sickens”: Roth, “Writing American Fiction.”
“perception is reality”: Simon Kelner, “Perception Is Reality: The Facts Won’t Matter in Next Year’s General Election,” Independent, Oct. 30, 2014; Roxie Salamon-Abrams, “Echoes of History? A Lesson Plan About the Recent Rise of Europe’s Far-Right Parties,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 2017.
But Atwater’s cold-blooded use: Lawrence Freedman, “Reagan’s Southern Strategy Gave Rise to the Tea Party,” Salon, Oct. 27, 2013.
Depicting America as a country: Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, and Robert Farley, “President Trump’s Inaugural Address,” FactCheck.org, Jan. 20, 2017; Chris Nichols, “Mostly True: Undocumented Immigrants Less Likely to Commit Crimes Than U.S. Citizens,” PolitiFact California, Aug. 3, 2017; Akhila Satish, “The Nobel Laureate Exclusion Act: No Future Geniuses Need Apply,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2017; Rani Molla, “The Top U.S. Tech Companies Founded by Immigrants Are Now Worth Nearly $4 Trillion,” Recode, Jan. 12, 2018; “Fact Check: Donald Trump’s Republican Convention Speech, Annotated,” NPR, July 21, 2016.
Long before he entered politics: Vivian Yee, “Donald Trump’s Math Takes His Towers to Greater Heights,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2016; Marc Fisher and Will Hobson, “Donald Trump Masqueraded as Publicist to Brag About Himself,” Washington Post, May 13, 2016; David Barstow, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,” New York Times, July 16, 2016; Fahrenthold and O’Harrow, “Trump: A True Story.”
He spent years as a real-estate developer: Aaron Williams and Anu Narayanswamy, “How Trump Has Made Millions by Selling His Name,” Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2017; “10 Donald Trump Business Failures,” Time, Oct. 11, 2016.
“planned, planted, or incited”: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 11.
for his “well-knownness”: Ibid., 65.
would even host a show: Laura Bradley, “Trump Bashes Schwarzenegger’s Celebrity Apprentice, Forgets He Still Produces It,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 6, 2017.
“prince of humbugs”: Boorstin, Image, 209–11.
Much the way images: Ibid., 241, 212.
“desert of the real”: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Jean Baudrillard”; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
“a secret society of astronomers”: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), loc. 21–22, 34, Kindle.
“Reality gave ground”: Ibid., 33.
“If there is something comforting”: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), loc. 434, Kindle.
In a 2016 documentary: Brandon Harris, “Adam Curtis’s Essential Counterhistories,” New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2016.
“red-pilling the normies”: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “The Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About,” Select All, May 18, 2017.
study on online disinformation: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, Data and Society Research Institute, May 15, 2017.
“once groups have been red-pilled”: Marwick and Lewis, “Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About.”
“it’s a surprisingly short leap”: Ibid.
a lot of fake news: BBC Trending, “The Saga of ‘Pizzagate’: The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2016.
Reddit can be a useful testing ground: Ali Breland, “Warner Sees Reddit as Potential Target for Russian Influence,” Hill, Sept. 27, 2017; Roger McNamee, “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us,” Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb./Mar. 2018.
“asymmetry of passion”: Renee DiResta, “Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality by Boosting Conspiracy Theories,” Fast Company, May 11, 2016.
5. THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE
“Without clear language”: John le Carré, “Why We Should Learn German,” Guardian, July 1, 2017.
“We swim in language”: James Carroll, Practicing Catholic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 302.
“political chaos is connected”: George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1954), 177.
Ministry of Truth: Orwell, 1984, Kindle.
characteristics of “wooden language”: Roger Scruton, “Newspeak,” in The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); “The Wooden Language,” Radio Romania International, old.rri.ro/arh-art.shtml?lang=1&sec=9&art=4166.
Thom identified in a 1987 thesis: Françoise Thom, La langue de bois (Paris: Julliard, 1987).
Mao’s Communist Party also adopted: Ji Fengyuan, Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Perry Link, “Mao’s China: The Language Game,” NYR Daily, May 15, 2015.
One of history’s most detailed: Timothy Snyder, “A New Look at Civilian Life in Europe Under Hitler,” review of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2016.
“tiny doses of arsenic”: Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12, 15.
Klemperer didn’t think Hitler: Ibid., 54–55, 30, 118, 44–45.
“a threatening and repulsive”: Ibid., 60–62, 5, 101–3.
“literally fixed the essential features”: Ibid., 19.
“finished off the biggest elephants”: Ibid., 222, 227, 223, 224, 228.
“WAR IS PEACE”: Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 16.
“the single greatest witch hunt”: Rebecca Savransky, “Trump: ‘You Are Witnessing the Single Greatest WITCH HUNT in American Political History,’ ” Hill, June 15, 2017; Michael Finnegan, “Trump Attacks on Russia Investigation Threaten U.S. Democracy, Authors Say,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 6, 2018; Anne Gearan, “Trump’s Attacks on Justice and FBI Echo Election Claims of a ‘Rigged System,’ ” Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2018.
Trump has the perverse habit: Jessica Estepa, “It’s Not Just ‘Rocket Man.’ Trump Has Long History of Nicknaming His Foes,” USA Today, Sept. 21, 2017; Theodore Schleifer and Jeremy Diamond, “Clinton Says Trump Leading ‘Hate Movement’; He Calls Her a ‘Bigot,’ ” CNN Politics, Aug. 25, 2016; “Excerpts from Trump’s Interview with the Times,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 2017.
“two mutually contradictory meanings”: Orwell, 1984, 212.
the “largest audience”: Linda Qiu, “Donald Trump Had Biggest Inaugural Crowd Ever? Metrics Don’t Show It,” PolitiFact, Jan. 21, 2017.