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Village life: War on truth

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

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I'm warning you, I'm in a very bad mood.

Fall is supposed to be an exuberant time. After all, many of us are going back to school. Isn't that what we love? Aren't we the people who say, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste"?

I'm not so sure. The country has never needed cultivated, energetic minds more than now. But it's been a bruising summer. Does it seem to anybody else that the atmosphere, intellectually speaking, was pathetic? Dangerously dumb? Peopled by knuckleheads and lunkheads who, inexplicably, the rest of us dunderheads elected?

I don't know what will have happened by the time you read this. Maybe, miraculously, things will be better. I hope so. But even if so, the tragi-comedy of stupidity and malfeasance to which we've all been subjected is an outrage of the most alarming proportions. Our lives — all that we love and care about — are being put at risk because of a government that no longer governs.

I have a very good life.

Last night I walked with my husband along the cliffs at Pt. Fermin Park in San Pedro — a place I have been visiting for 10 years because this is where my husband works. That park means the world to me. When I'm there, I am grateful —  for the amazing luck and love of my life, for how Ted and I have both survived hard times and struggled through many personal and professional challenges. Being at this park is a life-sustaining reminder for me that there is goodness in the world.

As we stroll around the park we look up and count pelicans. We comment about the fragrance of the air and the progress of the sunset, the tide. We greet other walkers and enjoy the menagerie of dogs, everybody so happy to be there.

But even in this glorious spot, one of the most beautiful on earth, lately something nags at me. I looked down over the bluff last night and saw a tangle of string, collapsed balloons and Styrofoam. An inescapable, revolting reminder — the oceans are in trouble and the ice caps are melting. The Midwest and East have been baking in a summer of climate change more than a third of Americans say isn't real.

As a columnist and writing teacher I'm supposed to stay responsibly in the left side of my brain.

Stay cool, stay reasonable, rely on evidence, see all sides.

Instead, I'm feeling something dark and uneasy — a persistent coil of anger, a dull drum roll of fear. It's not just in my head, but in my other brain — the primal one, the gut that never lies.

It's the feeling that everything is going to hell. I'm embarrassed by my government. I'm ashamed that in my country, the country I love, we are continually failing to fix real problems. We have forgotten how to work together, how to be gracious and smart.

Perhaps we never knew.

But have the stakes ever been higher?

Has the evidence of our bitter entropy, the sour trivialities of our fractious infights, ever been more dangerous?

I don't know about you, but I have fought hard and waited long for whatever happiness I now possess — the daily blessings I do not take for granted. It infuriates me that those beloved parts of my life —  the birds, soil, air, water, the safety of my food, all the loveliness of this once-fruitful blue planet — all are being compromised and in many cases terminally threatened by the failure of my country to get its act together.

And the worst part is that I feel like we're all to blame. It feels like we're a nation of enablers, abused wives defending sociopathic lummoxes, all the while murmuring, "I probably deserved it."

As I used to tell clients long ago when I was a counselor trying to do no harm, "yes, damn it, you deserve better."

Do we?

Well, there is a fine line between manipulated guilt and outrage. What helps us cross from one to the other is truth.

That brings me back to where I started — education. The war against evidence, the war against those who would teach us to think, the war against our defense of truth — all this is well-documented and progressing faster than any overseas campaign.

We are being tricked into suspecting each other and disrespecting a love of truth for the classic reasons. Fighting among ourselves, perhaps we will not notice we are being taken by a tiny few who do not care about anything but their own power.

The ancient Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus famously asserted, "The first casualty of war is truth." That's especially tragic when the war is itself a war on truth.

Truth will of course win, even if none of us are here for it. That badass Neil DeGrasse Tyson nailed it recently on the Bill Maher show when he said "the good thing about science is that it's true whether you believe in it or not."

Years ago when the poet Robert Hass was in Flint, I remember him saying that one of the most polluted rivers in the country is the Anacostia. It is where all the sewage from the Capitol flows. The image is sadly apt.

But Washington, D.C., is still beautiful. I especially love the Lincoln Memorial. His Second Inaugural, inscribed on one wall, grabs my heart every time. It is not just his breathtaking "malice toward none" conclusion after the bloodiest war in U.S. history, but this, in the middle, that always strikes me:

"It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

This August, the folly of these conflicting pleas to a mute Almighty seems as timely, and as horrifying, as ever.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the interim director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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