"Then Give Them All The Lie"

There are seasons of history when lies move in on a country and come down on the people like weather.

Not one lie, or a few lies, but a whole front of them, settling in, darkening the sky, until it’s as if the only thing that the people can see are lies.

The fascist regimes of the last century covered the skies above with lies like that. So did the totalitarian communist states. North Koreans live under that sky still. And once again, from the mighty stones of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin is making a determined effort to rebuild the old Soviet empire of lies. Other regimes—Iran, Cuba, Eritrea—use lies not necessarily to persuade everyone, but to brutalize them: to demonstrate that power can force people to repeat what they know to be false.

And then there is our own strange and tragic case: Donald Trump's relentless, half-successful effort to erect an alternative reality—political, cultural, medical, historical—on a foundation of falsehood.

It’s a challenge for Trump. America is different. We are too open, too argumentative, too unruly a society for truth to be erased altogether. There are too many sources of information, too many independent institutions, too many citizens who insist on looking for themselves.

And yet Donald Trump has succeeded, at least partly, in constructing an alternative political and cultural reality for tens of millions of Americans.

In that reality, Trump won the 2020 election. Vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. Anthony Fauci helped create COVID and killed millions. Democrats can win elections only by cheating. The United States has won the war against Iran. The ayatollahs are begging for a deal. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Trump has ended eight wars. He has won California three times, except for the fraudulent votes. The Reflecting Pool was deliberately vandalized by a former Olympian.

Trump’s lies overwhelm the body politic, like a disease. They thrill the faithful—tens of millions of Americans have altered their reality according to Trump’s lies, or have simply gone along with them. It’s intoxicating to shatter reality. Addicting.

But it’s not the thrill of the faithful that worries me. It’s the despair of everyone else.

The brazenness, the scale of the falsehoods, the fact that belief in the lies is forged with furious resentment against anyone who dares to name them—it’s all too much for so many Americans.

The Republic of Lies that Donald Trump is attempting to establish can feel like a kind of crushing weight on decent people who love this country and have begun to wonder whether truth has any purchase left at all.

How can a country function when millions of people refuse to acknowledge basic facts? What can an honest person do against a political movement that treats evidence itself as an enemy?

Not always quickly. Not always triumphantly. Truth does not descend from the heavens in a blaze of transcendent glory and automatically vanquish those who oppose it. If only it were so easy.

History reveals a constant struggle, one where truth loses many battles. Lies can rule countries, fill prisons, and send armies marching. They can survive for generations.

But they cannot repeal reality.

What happened in Washington last week demonstrated that quiet power, in the final instance, that the simple truth still has to shape events.

Jeanine Pirro, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime Trump loyalist, moved to dismiss charges against former Olympic kayaker David Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing what Trump called the “sacred” Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.

The evidence showed something else, something much more prosaic, far less conspiratorial. The tears in the pool’s coating were, as Pirro declared in her utterly convincing motion to dismiss the case against Daivd Hearn, “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

That is all. A sentence. A true sentence.

Trump is reportedly furious, and Pirro may well be fired for it. But for her to remain a human being, she really had no choice, and the motion she signed is, in its dry lawyerly way, a small manifesto: evidence matters. That any of this should feel heroic tells you all you need to know about the historic moment we are living through. Pirro herself brought the bogus indictment of Hearn.

But in our courts, still, evidence matters. The coating was either deliberately torn or it was badly installed. No president raging through an answer at a press conference, no speech, no threat, no social-media post could change what had actually happened.

Trump’s most devoted loyalists can no longer sustain the fantasy that the war against Iran has been “won” or is “over,” or that Iran’s leaders are simply begging him for a deal.

War possesses an ineluctable reality. People die. Families grieve. Missiles fall. Blood itself is a fact that demands respect and honor. The truth.

You cannot BS your way out of a war.

Inflation has a similar granite resistance to lies. Politicians can twist and celebrate statistics and announce prosperity all they want, but people know what food costs. They know whether the rent is due, whether the credit card balance is rising, whether the paycheck will last until the end of the month.

You cannot flim-flam people out of the facts of their own lives.

Trump’s sliding poll numbers—among the worst that any sitting president has ever had—feel to me like reality is seeping back in to the body politic, like medicine. More Americans are coming back to the understanding that the world outside the lie has not disappeared. The truth is outing.

Our poem this week is an old, simple affirmation of this. It’s by the Elizabethan poet Sir Walter Raleigh. (I can never hear that name without thinking of the childhood prank of my generation, calling up the local tobacconist and asking, “Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can?”—that being the trade name of a popular tobacco. “Yes,” would come the reply. “Then you better let him out!” we’d holler, and hang up.)

The poem is called, “The Lie.” It uses the phrase, “to give the lie,” which in the Elizabethan context meant to accuse someone or some institution directly to their face of being false, dishonest, or hypocritical. Go out into the world, Raleigh tells his soul, and expose the world’s deceptions.

—Terry

by Sir Walter Raleigh

Go, soul, the body’s guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant.

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What’s good, and doth no good.

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others’ action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate.

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust.

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how it falters.

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness.

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention.

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay.

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming.

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it’s fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth.

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.