"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Monday, May 26, 2025

Putting The Truth To Rest - Donald Trump, AI, And The Delights Of Rumor, Innuendo, And Tall Tales

Let's face it, no one likes the truth. We might say we do and hold politicians' feet to the fire when we suspect misstatements, but the only fact is America is a land of image, fantasy, and the confabulated world of rumor, innuendo, and tall tales. 

What is the truth anyway except someone's idea of it? Durrell, Browning, and Kurosawa among other artists and writers have not surprisingly concluded that the best we can manage is different readings of the same event.  Truth, reality is nothing more than perceptions of it.

 

Eye witness accounts confirm the assumption.  The recent case of a drive-by shooting was brought to court and eye witnesses called by the prosecution and the defense saw different things.  It was as if each had observed a different event.  The car was either blue or green, a sedan or SUV, driven by black man or a Latino, or a Mediterranean-looking white man, the gun was an Uzi, an assault rifle, or a Glock.  Eye witnesses see what they want to see. 

Political belief distorts reality to conform to preconceived notions; and the more passionately the beliefs are held, the greater the distortion.  Since most progressives are convinced that Donald Trump is evil or at best a hateful, destructive simile of it, all policies, programs, initiatives, councils, or negotiations can only be seen through that lens. He is ipso facto wrong. 

If Donald Trump’s America is Hell, who is Satan? | Salon.com

Psychologists and neuroscientists agree on one thing - memory is not only fallible, it is little more than a construct of imagined happenings, wishes and preferences, and third-party add-ons.  What we remember about Aunt Tilly's Christmas dinner when Uncle Harry upsent the wine decanter and spoiled the roast is the product of retelling, the mini-distortions of each account, and the personal desire to conclude one truth, our truth. 

Not only that, America is a land of image-first, glorified Hollywood renditions of reality,  In a book about the Jews of Hollywood, Empire of Their Own, author Neal Gabler recounts how Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B Mayer, Jewish immigrants, refugees from the pogroms of Europe, created an America that never existed nor could exist but should exist, a happy world of beauty, success, reward, love, and romance.  A willing suspension of disbelief when the American moviegoer left their Hobbesian nasty, brutish, and short lives for the marvelous fantasies of Hollywood. 

Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, created a Devil who says he his a vaudevillian, a tummler, a jokester and a trickster and without him life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sundays and Holy Mass. Life is an absurdity, God's ironic creation, and man's impossibly idealistic interpretation of it. 

 

And so it is that the spectacle of American life is a hilarious, outrageous one. Who can watch blubbering televangelists apologize for their hands in the cookie jar or up a woman's dress without laughing; or to listen to the cockamamie excuses politicians give for their dalliances - hiking on the Appalachian Trail instead of a weekend tryst in Buenos Aires, distributing food at a soup kitchen instead of cheating on a dying wife. 

John Edwards not only lied through his teeth about his indiscretions, but paid an aide to claim paternity of the Senator's illegitimate child.  Bill Clinton's mastery of parsing, disaggregating, disassembling, and recreating his own fable of the truth is epic.  Mark Sanford's lies were so absurd that even the most credulous and supportive dismissed them as poppycock. 

Enter Donald Trump, the most free and easy with the truth politician ever to grace the American scene, a man of bombast, hyperbole, confabulations, and unimaginable confections; and his supporters love it.  The first real American President.  A man straight out of the tradition of snake oil salesman, get-rich-quick money peddlers, streetcorner preachers of salvation and redemption, con artists, carny barkers, hustlers and Borscht Belt tummlers.

He is as outrageous as Jackie Mason a comedian with everyone in his sights.  No one was beyond ridicule, no ridiculous act out of bounds, no posturing, posing, or vanity left unnoticed.  Trump supporters hear his one-liners, his hilarious caricatures, and his overstatements parse them for the point, the 'truth' of policy within. Exaggeration and tall tales were embellishments of a point about immigration, energy, climate fiction, progressive fancy, and European wobbly knees. 

It has been a delight to have a man in the White House who is as American as they come, fast and easy with just about everything, a man of image, production, and marketing.  He picked on USAID, an agency whose budget represents a tiny, miniscule fraction of the national budget, to ransack and not the bloated bureaucracies of the military, Medicare, or welfare because it played well.  Transgender training for Malawian miners, gay cooking classes in Zimbabwe, speech therapy for Salvadoran retirees got the picture of endemic government waste and fraud better than any deep diving on gears and wheels for the obsolete M-1 tank. 

Democrat lawfare suits have singled out his real estate dealings, alleging that he overstated the value of his properties to make an unfair profit from their sale.  Of course did, and in the caveat emptor mean street world of New York real estate every single developer would have done the same thing.  A sale price is nothing more than an overture, an inflated assessment of worth par for the course.  International relations are no different.  Lies, distortions, posturing? Yes indeed. 

Now enter Artificial Intelligence, AI, the newest and latest technology to further obfuscate 'the truth', settled science, reality.  There is now no way to determine whether Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Pope Leo is actually saying what they seem to be saying on YouTube.  The phony avatars are remarkably accurate, what they say includes just enough 'truth' to give the whole spiel credibility. Now everyone can be a tummler, a fantasist, a Donald Trump. 

Facts and 'the truth' have long been overrated and overvalued not only because they are only products of perception, belief, and idealism; not only because people want to disregard them in favor of a Hollywood version; but because America is the image, faux truth capital of the world.  

'Get over it', says Trump, the prophet of the New Age, Tummler In Chief, man of un-substance but immense popularity.  He's on to something and always has been, and Americans are coming around to tossing out the troglodytes of the Left who insist on hammering, hectoring, and badgering about the truth until they are blue in the face. 

Nothing in this new generation is as it seems, and Donald Trump is the man for the times. 



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