Tell the truth.

Tell the truth.
Pinkos are as tempted as anyone else to fudge the facts, see only what’s convenient, and lie to ourselves. I repeat: Pinkos are as tempted as anyone else to fudge the facts, see only what’s convenient, and lie to ourselves. Just because we are on the side of parenthood and apple pie doesn’t mean we don’t share the human capacity for deceiving ourselves and each other. Fortunately, we have less need to lie than the freaks who murder for profit. Here and there reality might contradict our druthers, but so long as we use the world itself as our touchstone, we can be confident we’re on the right track, and that our broad analysis can accommodate even inconvenient truths. It’s part of trusting the good sense of our neighbors. The case for democracy doesn’t need to be inflated with feeble fictions.

Later on, as we take steps toward a real democracy, some of us may be in a position to govern. That's when we'll really be tempted to lie. Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie details how the armies and agencies of the U.S. and South Viet Nam colluded to cover up each other's weaknesses, corruption, wishful thinking, strategic blunders and murders, because each needed the others to maintain its own reason for being.

People with good intentions are not immune from this kind of mutual deceit and consensual fantasizing. A lot of the killers in Viet Nam claimed to have the best of intentions. We should practice telling the truth till it's hard to do otherwise.

In the meantime, seems to me our likelier shortcomings have to do with reducing our understanding to slogans, and applying double standards to friends and the people we fear. So:

• Talk beyond the slogans.
Rightists like to caricature democratic ideas as foolishly simplistic; for example, that the most internationally-minded sector of our society is “isolationist”; that we think all ideas have the same value; that men are the problem; that we coddle children and criminals. (It’s also not true, despite their language and policies, that all rightists see children as criminals.)

Nevertheless we do sometimes refer to complex problems in shorthand, which can harm our understanding and our credibility. Poverty has a lot to do with crime, but it doesn’t cause crime. Wars do solve problems--for the investors. Specific groups are especially oppressed, but that is not the whole of their experience or identity.

It’s important to tell our political stories coherently, to trace the intertwining fabric of injustice. We’ve got to do that without reducing the substance to catchphrases that seem alien to most folks.


• Avoid double standards.
Whenever we try to judge a situation or make a choice, we refer to standards or criteria. A lot of times these are informal. But they are always linked to our goals. Does this path help us survive, protect a resource, dismantle a lie, weaken corrupt authority, build democratic organizations? But we don't always apply our standards consistently. That causes us to work at cross-purposes, and undermines our credibility.

I remember a conversation with a colleague, a religious guy. I happened to mention the centuries of religious murder, just in passing, mind you. My friend said, We can't judge God by human standards. And so it's been through history-- give a pass to the powerful because they are somehow better, wiser, have better access or intentions than the rest of us. Not just popes and dictators in faraway lands. How fast many of us shrugged at the McCain and Obama dirty tricks during the '08 campaign!

Fortunately, we have learned to be a bit more skeptical of some leaders, at least those with whom we disagree. When some rich guy strip mines a mountain, for instance, we don't always believe that he's doing it for our own good. We don't necessarily accept that the investors have trashed U.S. industry because of Mr. Walmart's fond affection for the starving Chinese.

More and more, we demand accountability from the bosses. We have to apply it to ourselves as well:


# Back up our claims. When we talk about situations that are outside most people’s experience, we need to explain our conclusions; see "Connect the Dots", below.

By the same token, we’ve got to avoid claims we can’t document-- that Mossad bombed the World Trade Towers, that Hurricane Katrina killed 10,000 people, that immigrants take only jobs “Americans don’t want” (a lie and an insult) and other assertions that might strengthen our critique of current policies-- if only they were true.

Some years back my niece cc’d me one of those rumors that had been circulating the net about merchandiser Tommy Hilfiger’s racist remarks. I replied with some pious pablum about those perfidious corporations. It turned out, of course, that it was just another urban legend, one of those friend-of-a-friend fictions that we repeat endlessly to each other because they express so well our fears and prejudices. I felt pretty stupid having let such a tiny factoid bear the burden of my grand ideological monument, when there was so much true information I could have shared. It’s what I drummed into my GED students: always ask each other and ourselves, How do we know? (By the way, snopes.com is an interesting site at which to track many popular rumors.)

We can’t know everything about everything. Nor is it our responsibility to investigate every lie spewed on right-wing radio, much as I admire Al Franken’s ferocious and hilarious rebuttals. They can invent ‘m faster than we could ever track ‘m down. But we can demand that they back up every claim. Who said what, when? How much did they get paid, or threatened? What about the people you never talked to? How do your examples compare with the entire population, or how things were ten and fifty years ago? And when a neighbor repeats one of these unlikely claims, I try to ask her the same questions.

But that means we have to be rigorous ourselves. My understanding of institutionalized racism, sexism, and war helps guide my questions when pressing issues come up, but does not substitute for doing the research. How does what we know apply in these circumstances? How do the specific facts change our understanding and approach?

It's also important to keep track of our sources. I totally trust my friend who tells me that studies have linked environmental causes with the rise in breast cancer --it accords with so much else I know about toxics and human health-- but if I’m going to use that information politically, I need to find out where it came from. Not everyone shares the same environmental health perspective / model / Story that I have, and I need to supply other people strong materials to build their own. It drives me crazy when people pass me email with interesting information and forget to say where it came from. The only information I want is information I can use; and I can't use something for which I have no source. I can't use "what everyone knows". Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein planned to attack the U.S. with nuclear and chemical weapons.

Often our suspicions are correct, but we cannot claim them as fact if our research turns up little evidence. Folks have told me, We can’t trust the mainstream media to bring us this information. Well, sure (depending on whose ox is gored with any particular story). That doesn’t license us to make up our own.

On the other hand, sometimes we have the data to challenge lousy people and policies, and then don’t bother to share it. It's easier to slap on a bumper sticker than to make the case. The policymakers have every resource to defend their decisions-- experts and statistics and the whole toolbox of appeals to prejudice--leaving us looking unprepared and silly.


# Resist romanticizing. It’s very important that we understand what folks went through who came before us; how they set up the conditions for our joys and struggles today. But we don’t need the commercial media to canonize democrats, because the process sanitizes and reduces them. M. L. King was a far bigger person than his saintly legend allows, just as the movement was far bigger than the people we saw on the podiums. Further, as with King and many another icon, heroizing people sets them up for deflation. Why would I want to sanctify King for little kids, only to set them up for disappointment when they hear he liked sex? As far as I can tell, it’s mainstream politicians and propagandists who start the sanitizing process, though sometimes activists like to ride the coattails of some fallen hero.

Then there are the creeps we pinkos have sometimes romanticized from afar-- Stalin in the 1930s, various southern dictators more recently. Outsiders may not have known all their rotten doings, but we sure do know enough to ask questions and demand answers, just as we do with the corporados and presidents. Where there are no democratic structures to start with, our struggles cannot start out entirely democratic, but they damn well better move in that direction (see Omelet, below).

We can romanticize whole groups of people--it might be blue collar workers, African Americans, Native people, or Bolivian peasants. We love people, so we know how complex and changing we can be; still, it's easy to make unrealistic assumptions about shared politics.

Then there's the old habit of imagining faraway lands and times to be places of peace and plenty, Timeless Values, freedom, family, and harmony with nature. Did you ever see that movie, Whale Rider? A pretty tale, with nice progressive elements: an exotic society, a nonconformist teen heroine, mystical whales. A good friend of mine loved it, saw it twice. I thought it was the ugliest movie I’d seen in a long time.

Here’s the plot: A guilt-ridden Maori kid tries for years to earn her traditionalist granddad’s approval, but he spurns her because she’s a girl. Basically he’s an old grump who doesn’t like anyone much. She risks her life to show that she possesses all the qualities of a traditional male leader. She talks with the whales and saves her people. Grandpa likes her now, mellows out, The End, Amen.

What I didn’t like was how much respect the flick pays to authoritarian values. Grandpa turns his back on the world, hand him a razor blade. Maybe he’ll complete his trajectory before he hurts anyone else. The basic premise is that we need to seek approval of abusers. Fans of the movie will reject my reading as too harsh, that I take too seriously what is after all just a fairy tale. But even fantasies carry politics. Especially fantasies.

Well, it was gringos who made that movie. It gets tricky when we're dealing directly with cultural traditions outside our own. We might not understand what a particular behavior means to the people who practice it. We may not complain about the motes in another's eyes while ignoring the beams in our own.

At the same time, if we don't think pushing women around is right in our society, we may not honor "traditions" that do that in other cultures. Many times, in rejecting dictatorships imposed by Western colonial powers, people of other countries fall back upon local traditions and values. These are not always helpful. Slavery, caste, torture, rape, silence, uncritical obedience, warrior privilege, preying on outsiders, destroying ecosystems, all these have religious and popular sanction in other societies as well as our own. Usually we can see how they have been imposed by unjust elites, but not always. It's the worst kind of patronizing, racist ignorance to embrace every claim of someone based in another culture in the name of tolerance or global solidarity. When it's not clear what's going on, we have to raise questions.

The flip side of romanticizing our allies is taking cheap shots at the bosses. They hurt our credibility. The one part I didn’t like in Michael Moore’s 9/11 movie was the tape of George Junior sitting stunned in the grade school class during the attack on the World Trade Center, while Moore speculated in voiceover about all the dark conspiracies Bush was hatching at that moment. For all we know, Junior could have been thinking about flowers, or a ham and cheese sandwich. Murderers are not demons, just murderers. We should have learned from the way most people resented the GOP’s over-reaching attacks on Bill Clinton’s sex life.