And the Truth Shall Make You Free - John 8:32

 And the Truth Shall Make You Free - John 8:32

When, in 1601, England’s King James I decided to “translate” the Bible to clarify some of the biblical uncertainty of its “first drafts,” he couldn’t have predicted the political fallout from Anglicans, Catholics, Protestants, and those pesky rebel splinter groups, the Puritans and Calvinists. Just think about the consternation that would have been wrought if Lord Zuckerberg had been born 383 years earlier and had created Ye Olde Facebook that could spread the word faster than a melting glacier. Yes, when they included the statement from the Gospel of John that reads, “ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” they hadn’t contemplated the likes of Donald Trump, Fox News, and our new Trumpublican Party.

Now it seems that any new translation of what Jesus meant over 2,000 years ago, would have to account for the circular reasoning of the GOP where, according to Saint Giuliani, “the truth is not the truth.” Any new translation would have to deal with 2.7 billion Facebook users who create 4.7 billion posts a day, many of which have no more concern for the truth than Donald Trump has for it during a tax audit or most other times for that matter.

Hyper-partisan arguments, tribal political bias, conspiracy theories, and propaganda, are all now part of the amalgam where truth is so hidden as to be beyond the grasp of many Americans. Our new “facts” may or may not have some kernel of truth at their core, but they can be wrapped in so much BS as to totally distort what is factual into an alternate reality for the gullible.

We currently see people who believe, without any proof or facts, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. They totally ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is what they want to believe so it becomes their new reality. It used to be that this fringe lived within the bubble of Fox News, but now, even that bastion of conservatism has been called out for not being supportive of a more radical and unhinged belief system; one that borders on the absurd.

In the post-WWII 1950s, we had a new form of drama that emphasized the absurdity of human existence using disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue to promote purposeless situations that were devoid of logic and defied reality. It was called the Theatre of the Absurd and it questioned the nature of reality and illusion. History has a habit of repeating itself and we now find ourselves contemplating the Political Theatre of the Absurd. The new Republican Party is blindly following their blonde Monty Python into the land of the absurd, but unlike the original Pythons, this Flying Circus is devoid of humor.

Chief Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1927, that the best remedy to “falsehood and fallacies” was not the “enforced silence” of censorship, but “more speech.” This served us well for nearly a century, but our current cacophony of falsehoods has reached a crescendo in this era of Twitter and Facebook where the truth is not merely a needle in a haystack of untruths, it is but a single grain of salt in an ocean of lies. Our only defense seems to be logic and common sense, but that too is in short supply. We should not have to rely on the likes of Mark Zuckerberg to be our arbiter of truth.

The 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump by a massive voter fraud campaign that included secret shipments of ballots from China that were slipped into the Arizona voting system in the dead of night. Fraudulent ballots were not fed to chickens which were later incinerated to more adequately cover up massive fraud. The kind folks who visited the Capitol on January 6th were not part of some tour group who walked calmly through that building in an orderly fashion. The Coronavirus was serious, masks helped prevent the spread of the disease, and the approved vaccines are remarkably safe and effective. False claims about these last three items, cost us many avoidable deaths. The Big Lie and its ilk are killing our democracy.

The truth may eventually set us free, but at what cost? While I have some sympathy for the under-educated who may have been fooled with information spread by the careless and callous, I have no sympathy for the educated among the GOP who knowingly use lies just because it is an easier path to reelection. I strongly disagree with much of what Liz Cheney stands for, but I respect her commitment to the truth in the face of recriminations from her own party for promoting the truth. For the GOP, “Ye may know the truth but it is the Big Lie that will get you elected and reelected.”

Perhaps Trump, those in the GOP infatuated with the “neon god they made,” and other members of the cult, should read the words of Coolio from his Gansta’s Paradise where he says,

“Power and the money, money and the power

Minute after minute, hour after hour

Everybody's runnin', but half of them ain't lookin'

It's goin' on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cookin'"

"Tell me why are we so blind to see

That the ones we hurt are you and me?"