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Can We Laugh Yet?
by Steve Bhaerman


 NO! It’s still not funny.

Even though Swami Beyondananda told us right away the election results could be blamed on “voting irregularities” (constipated people went for the current regime at a rate of 2-1), and even though he has proposed an official change in the Democrats’ theme song from “It’s My Party, and I’ll Cry If I Want To” to “I Concede Clearly Now,” it’s still not funny. Even though we hear from reputable reporters like Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann that there was likely some funny business around voting machines and vote counting, it’s still not funny.


When my friend Rita Abrams sent me an email about a sad song she was writing, “I’m In a Blue State,” I smiled, but only briefly. The best way to sum up my state of heart this past week is the way I felt the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was in my first year as a teacher in Washington, D.C. at the time, and I came home to hear the tragic and disheartening news. That night I went out with two older teacher friends who had been part of Freedom Summer in 1964 and got good and drunk.


This time I did nothing to alter the sobering state I -- and the country -- was in. Those folks who went to Ohio and all of the other swing states this season to try register Democrats and swing the swing vote, they were the Freedom Riders forty years later. Once again, they often found themselves in African American communities, but this time they were securing the rights of democracy for all of us.


Those folks in ‘64 didn’t fail, they succeeded. And we will too. But the death of Martin Luther King was a serious setback, as is Bush’s self-declared “mandate” (hey, I thought he said he opposed homosexual liasons). But as the Swami tells us, now is not the time for despair. We’ve got four years to look forward to, so let’s save some of our despair for when we really need it.


But seriously, folks ... what are the lessons learned? Is there any good news? Who do we have to be, and what do we have to do to nudge our world towards evolution instead of the current state of devolution? Here are a few thoughts ...


Hardball vs. Hardly-Have-Balls

The first lesson learned is that once again the Democrat (I can’t bring myself to say “democratic”) Party leadership has confirmed the Swami’s sad joke: “For the past ten years the Republicans have been playing hardball, and the Democrats have been playing hardly-have-balls.” Just as Gore allowed himself to get gored by the ruthless Republican machine, John Kerry fought politely just as if he were dealing with an opponent who played by the Marquis of Queensbury rules -- instead of the Marquis de Sade rules.


Forget the “L-word.” The Democrats’ biggest crime was not invoking the “F-word” -- fascism (or at least the other "f-word," fraud). Does this sound polarizing and alarmist? Well, when the proverbial Reichstag is on fire, somebody’s got to sound the alarm. The 2000 “election” should have been called what it was: a coup. The Coalition of the Willing should have been called what it was: The Coalition of the Willing-to-be-Intimidated-and-Deceived. The voting machines should have been called what they were in the 2002 Georgia election: Vote-changing machines.


Instead of playing modern day Paul Revere, riding through the heartland warning, “The brutish are coming, the brutish are coming!” the Democratic Central Committee and John Kerry acted as if they were participating in a fair election. The activists in the election, the former Dean supporters, knew very clearly what we were and are up against. Those in power in the Democratic Party seemed to be in denial. And I think ultimately, Kerry’s loss to a President who no longer had the trust of the majority of Americans came down to this: If John Kerry can’t stand up to the brutes in the Republicans’ ruling cadre, how can he stand up to terrorists?


While John Kerry may be a man of character who in his youth had the courage to stand up for his country and stand up to it (while George Bush as a young man did neither), he could not inspire leadership or vision. Never mind that he was a graduate cum laude (or maybe cum soft?) of the Michael Dukakis-Walter Mondale School of Charisma. He never managed to passionately awaken an electorate desperately seeking an alternative vision to endless warfare, growing gap between rich and poor, environmental destruction, loss of civil liberties and rule by theocratic fanatics. How difficult is it to paint a more attractive future than that? Apparently, for the kind of candidate whose greatest asset is the ability to deliver a concession speech, very difficult. Imagine what an untamperable landslide this would have been if voters had someone to vote for, not just someone to vote against.


The Body Politic and "Truth Decay"

The second lesson learned is the grave danger presented by what can only be called “the privatization of truth.” You know that old new age question, “Do we create our own reality?” Well apparently, for this election we did. We didn’t have two competing individuals or even two competing political parties as much as we had two completely different realities running against each other.


In one reality, we found those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Osama and Saddam were interchangeable Muslim blood brothers, and the world supported America’s invasion. According to Fox (which FYI, in numerology is “666”) and angry-white-man rant radio, the only way to fight the nebulous threat of “terrorism” is by force aimed at anyone who wasn’t “with us.” In this reality, President Bush was unfairly being bashed by mean and spiteful leftists, whose hate-America agenda made them nearly as dangerous as the terrorists. We won’t even go into the kind of moral “reality” you have to live in where two men lying together is an abomination, but there’s no sin when an entire administration lies together to bomb-a-nation.


Meanwhile, way on the other side we have people who believe that Paul Wellstone was assassinated, the current administration was complicit with the 9/11 attacks, and that this year’s election was rigged. Now you may be saying, “Yeah, but that’s true!” but here’s the problem: There is no sacrosant arbiter of the “truth,” or at least a close approximation of it. There is no Walter Cronkite anymore to tell us “that’s the way it is.” In fact, we have a sneaking suspicion that when we see something on the corporate-controlled media (or even some of the freewheeling web blogs) we can be sure “that’s the way it isn’t.”




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I’m not sure when this country went off the “truth standard” or if there ever was one. But it is clear to me that no democratic republic or free society can act constructively or wisely without people knowing the truth. The main concern I have with the Bush administration is not it’s Republicanism, but the way it has sought to suppress and then re-present the truth. The Nazis called this “The Big Lie.” In Russia, they called it “Pravda” (which, correct me if I’m wrong, means “truth” in Russian). In “1984” they called it Newspeak. (Those who thought 1984 was long past, think again. The Republican Right is at least 20 years behind the times.)


Privatizing truth means only allowing embedded reporters to report on the war and just as extra incentive, bombing the hotel where independent journalists are staying. Privatizing truth means secrecy for secrecy’s sake, where it’s okay to leak the name of a CIA operative but verboten to leak the name of the leaker. Privatizing truth means the interlocking directorate between government, corporate interests and “news.” And as the Swami would say, privatization of truth can only lead to the publication of lies.


The result is a country with no consensus and no center, a winner-take-all mentality with the cynical understanding that those who have the power, own the truth. In this system of “spin” (and let’s once and for all discard this cutesy word and replace it with the truer word, “lies”), everyone loses, whether they know it or not. The only winners are those who control and define the truth and use it to keep good-hearted and well-intentioned citizens on both sides barricaded behind their own irony curtain.


Not to pick on Fox, but hey -- they’re so easy to pick on. On one hand, Fox presents the kind of mean and sleazy entertainment designed to arouse the ire of moralists. And then, to satisfy this appetite for outrage created by the other programming, they provide easy-to-digest babblum and easy-to-bash scapegoats. This is marketing at its best. Reminds me of the genius who figured out to put Vic Tanny posters at Ben & Jerry’s.


Lincoln said it: A house divided cannot stand. And a country without a common truth -- any common truth, even one common truth -- cannot recognize (let alone defend itself from) evil, whether that evil comes from without or within. The greatest danger to our republic and the world is not knowing the truth. Now one of the erosive arguments we hear is that really, no one can know the truth, blah blah blah, it’s just one word against the other, etc., etc.


So let’s deconstruct this lie once and for all. Let’s simply define the “truth” as “what happened.” And yes -- belief in parallel universes aside -- only one thing happens in any given circumstance. If you watched the baseball playoffs this year, you remember the moment when the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, running to first base, karate-chopped the ball out of Boston pitcher Bronson Arroyo’s hand. All the first base umpire saw was the ball dribbling away and A-Rod reaching first base safely. He called the runner safe. But unlike days of yore, a confab of all the umpires was called and the home plate umpire saw what really happened. The umpires reversed the call and A-Rod -- who of course argued he never touched the pitcher -- was called out for interference. As we the viewers at home watched the play, we saw clearly A-Rod knocking the ball from Arroyo’s hands.


Now baseball is just a “game” and in the context of that game it’s acceptable to say you didn’t do something when you did. Other than Derek Jeter “dying” on second, nobody died on the basis of that fib. The same cannot be said for the war on Iraq. There too, something happened, and wouldn’t it be nice for us, the viewers at home, to see THAT on instant replay? Or Florida in the 2000 election? Or the lead up to the 9/11 attack? Or who actually prepared the envelopes of anthrax mailed to lawmakers? Etc., etc., etc. Something -- one thing -- happened in each of those cases, and knowing what that was is essential if we are really to be free people leading the “free world.”


How Much Would You Pay for a Truth Channel?

What if we had a real “Unsolved Mysteries” show that took on the Kennedy assassination or the disappearance of a trillion dollars from the Defense Department treasury? What if we had an actual independent Truth Channel, sort of a Consumer Reports for American citizens and people of the world, funded by donations only, without advertising, with the only agenda to find the unspun truth? What if the 55 million Americans who voted against the current regime each kicked in ten bucks a year to support a truly independent news organization dedicated to finding out what really happened? That’s only $550 million dollars, but hey it’s a start. We might have to call on another 100 million people worldwide who could afford $10 to kick in the rest ... a billion and a half dollars. A small fraction of what we’ve spent liberating Iraq, but not bad for a fledgling truth network.


I had a movie idea a few years ago. An “evil genius” comes up with a weapon designed to end civilization as we know it -- a completely accurate B.S. detector. Just aim it at the TV screen like a remote when a politician -- or anyone else -- is speaking and the real meaning appears as subtitles. Naturally, the authorities are in hot pursuit to destroy this weapon of mass deconstruction. As for how the movie ends, there are two alternative endings. In one version, the people of the world are ready to give up their stories and deceptions and face the truth of the human -- and their own -- shadow. In the other version, well ... pick up the newspaper and re-read the election results.


There is much truth to that Jack Nicholson line, “You can’t handle the truth!” The reason we can’t handle the truth is because we humans tend to only want to know what we already believe to be true. To quote another famous movie line, “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” Both the left and the right have two entirely different stories about what happened (creationism vs. evolution), what’s happening (a war to liberate Iraq vs. a war to conquer Iraq) and what’s going to happen (Jesus saving the faithful from God’s destruction of the world vs. we saving ourselves -- with the grace of God -- from human’s destruction of the world). Either, neither or both could be the actual truth. Or as Swami has said, each of us already has all of the answers within. Matching them with the corresponding questions, that is the challenge.