The wrong ride Trump took

Sam Smith -  Donald Trump is increasingly seen as our great problem, but I also see him as the result of a whole series of great problems we started gathering in the 1980s. As I wrote in the 1990s:

Sometime around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy. This realization first came in the midst of a meeting held to discuss a worthy investigative journalism project. We had considered every aspect of the proposal and now, unbidden, a single heretical question wiggled into my mind, never to leave: did the truth being sought really matter anymore?

At first it was only a sense of unease, a recognition that saying something true no longer commanded the respect it once had, an awareness that journalism was being driven away from the real and towards imaginings, mythologies and "perceptions." That news itself was disappearing from the evening news and from newspapers, its place taken by inflated and cliched descriptions, commentaries, and analyses.

We were, I had belatedly noticed, embarked upon an age that denied the existence of objective truth and, by extension, the value of any facts that might point to it. This was now an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick has put it, when everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself -- news no less than anything else. As one frustrated television journalist explained, "I used to be a reporter for the Washington Post; now I play one on TV."

In the end we have been left not with reality but with a recreated memory of reality, the repeated replacement of human experience. We watch C-SPAN to remember what democracy was about.

 

But if there is no value in truth and the real, then there is no value in pursuing any lack of these qualities. If nothing is real then what is left to report other than the image of what was once real? Hence the disappearance of facts from the media and their replacement by polls, pronouncements, and perceptions. Hence the growing feeling as we catch the evening news that we are watching a movie about television news that we've already seen.

 Even more troubling questions emerge. If there is no reality, what guides us in our choices? Do we simply become one more perception that we market to other perceptions?

Since I wrote this, power and perception have taken even more control over reality. And now we find ourselves with a president who doesn't even agree with what he himself said some years earlier and doesn't care because the real is the pitch you offer on tonight's TV. And then forget about.

Long before Trump became absurdly powerful, business schools were increasing their student bodies substantially. Television was making things like personal conversations and mutual analysis less important. And much of the media was assigning intelligence based on the power of its source rather than the logic and reality of their arguments. 

Fortunately, I have lived in cultures that didn't play that game. For example, even during my decades in Washington I learned to find wisdom in communities rather than just from the pronouncements of the most powerful. How was the city's latest scheme going to work? I learned to ask my neighbors and community activists and not just lawyers and city councilmembers. 

Now I get this information from those in a small town in Maine. It's a place where I had come in summers as a teenager and when I was thinking about my experiences the other day, I realized two of them had  turned out to be quite handy in Washington. I had learned as a young guy to sail and to farm and while those skills did not share much with national politics, they had one important thing in common: if you were in a boat or a field you couldn't talk your way out of bad situations; you had to have a solution. That isn't the way Washington works. 

The more I have thought about how reality, logic and decency are much easier to find in town of 8,000 or a DC neighborhood, the more I have realized that we have to give more attention and honor to the practice of decency than to the illusionary appeal of power. For example, the other day thinking about  the many decades I played in bands I realized something for the first time, namely that while I had many solos I had spent much more time backing up fellow musicians. Would Donald Trump have enjoyed this sort of secondary pleasure?

I'm nine years older than Donald Trump and one thing I've learned, but he hasn't, is that prominence is a transitory pleasure. For example, when you become 88 the number of those who will remember anything you did worth remembering is tiny. One reason for this is displayed on a sheet I have kept for several decades that lists all my friends, relatives or coworkers who have died.  My count is currently 203.

In short, life is short. Seek power if you wish but bear in mind that it is eventually either forgotten or replaced. It is the pleasure of friends and community that that doesn't fade. You are then part of the joys of life, and just  not its transitory boss.