Tag Archives: Lying

Support Our Troops

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Three puzzling words. Continue reading →

Whenever I see a bumper sticker or a window sticker, I try to imagine what aspect of that idea would be so powerful as to impel someone to deface their vehicle in order to display it. For me one of the most puzzling is the very common one: “Support Our Troops.” It is difficult, at least for me, to understand exactly what behavior the sticker is supposed to promote or suppress.

I was a “troop” in the early 1970’s, and I do not recall anyone campaigning to support us. In those days, a large percentage of the men in the military were draftees, and a large percentage of the others had only volunteered to avoid being drafted.

If “support” means provision of material goods, we certainly needed it more than today’s well-paid men and women in uniform. I remember making $125 per month, and I was heavily pressured by the brass to spend part of that on insurance and part on savings bonds. Of course, the army did subsidize the price of cigarettes and alcohol. The former cost a quarter a pack, and you could buy a six-pack of Lone Star at the PX for ninety cents.

The salaries of today’s soldiers, especially the ones deployed abroad, are many times as much as we received. Maybe mercenaries make more, but the amount paid to enlisted men and women today is enough for a family to live on comfortably. It therefore stands to reason that the verb “support” must refer not to monetary support but to some kind of psychological support. On the other hand, I have never heard anyone denigrate people who are serving in the military just because they are wearing uniforms. Nobody calls them “dog faces” or “Gomers” any more. So, what do the people with these bumper stickers want the rest of us to do? I suppose that what they mean is that members of the armed forces should be treated with respect, maybe even with deference. That idea resonates within the National Football League, which seems intent on paying tribute to the military as often as possible, and the airlines, which allow soldiers to board the aircraft before the civilians and sometimes proudly announce their presence.

Some people take this concept to the point of actively seeking out people in uniform and thanking them for their service. When I was actually in the military absolutely no one thanked me. The first person who did was the guy who was assigned the task of introducing me to the rest of the tour group in Italy in 2011. I was taken aback because I certainly would not have joined the military if I had not been forced to, and I have always considered my eighteen months in uniform as one long joke of which I was the butt.

When did all of this change? It changed on September 11, 2001, the day on which nineteen Saudis and Egyptians executed their plan to take advantage of massive holes in airline security in order to hijack four commercial airliners and fly them into buildings. “9/11 changed everything.” Somehow the president came to the conclusion that the proper response to this incident was to mobilize the armed forces in order to invade Iraq, which had been openly hostile to the perpetrators, and Afghanistan, which had indeed harbored people who supported them. Why anyone would consider the armed services as the appropriate tool for dealing with this problem has always been a mystery to me. It calls to mind Maslow’s Hammer: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the military wasn’t our only tool, of course, but it was the one that we had proudly spent over $500 billion per year on, and the vice-president was the former Secretary of Defense.

Over the next two or three years Americans really bought into the notion that military action was not only appropriate, but also necessary and, well, good. They were evil; we were good. Yellow ribbons bearing the famous phrase appeared on cars everywhere. There were almost as many stickers with the phrase “United We Stand.” Every man who appeared on television in a suit proudly displayed a pin with flag on his lapel. Dissent was not tolerated. It was considered almost criminal even to ask of the government how much all of this was going to cost, and how would we know if we had won the war.

Central to all of this was what I have called The Big Lie, which was the oft-repeated tale that the military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were somehow defending the United States. At first this was phrased as “We are fighting them there, so we do not need to fight them here.” Long after their leaders dropped this catch-phrase many Americans still clung to the notion that it was not just important but necessary for the United States to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in these two remote locations. To them the idea that this approach might be counterproductive — creating more terrorists than it eliminated — was, in Condoleeza Rice’s words, “grotesque.” They had invested a lot in this venture, and they were unwilling to accept that it had been a mistake.

Ten years have now passed since we invaded Iraq. What does it mean to “Support Our Troops?” I admit that I have not had the temerity to ask anyone who bears one of these stickers what they intend it to mean. My impression is that it really means: “I and my family have bought into The Big Lie. Don’t you dare say anything to question it.” I might be wrong, but I honestly cannot think of any other reason why someone would promulgate such a sentiment. I mean, it is not really about the troops, is it?

Twenty-first Century Liars

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Can you trust your parents? Continue reading →

I recently watched an episode on the PBS show Nature about crows. Evidently researchers now think that these birds are so intelligent that they can recognize human faces and can even use their system of calls to pass on information about specific people to other crows. One of the points that the show emphasized was that mental activities that were long considered unique to homo sapiens have now been verified in diverse areas of the animal kingdom.

What I took away from the show was somewhat different. I could not help wondering whether any of the crows were liars. I have long suspected that at least a few of the first dozen statements uttered by men were probably deliberate lies. Until prevarication by crows can be demonstrated by science, I will continue to believe in the superiority of our species. Even if such proof is forthcoming, I doubt that crows or any other animal have raised lying to the level of an art form the way that we humans have.

What ranks the biggest lie of the twenty-first century? Many people would probably nominate the Bush administration’s strident claim that there was “no doubt” that Iraq in 2003 possessed weapons of mass destruction. I strongly disagree. In fact, I am not sure that it was a lie at all. While the talking points that mentioned “smoking guns” and “mushroom clouds” were pure horse hockey, many knowledgeable people probably were pretty certain that Saddam Hussein still had a number of chemical weapons, which are relatively cheap, hanging around. After all, he had already deployed them once, and even the radical cult Aum Shinrikyo had managed to obtain enough sarin gas to attack the Japanese subway system in 1995. If you considered this type of chemical as a WMD, then it was reasonable to suppose that Iraq had some.

Far more outrageous was the linking of Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and his followers. From Osama’s perspective Saddam was perhaps the worst Muslim ruler in the world. He ran a secular state that tolerated a thriving Christian community; he even wrote trashy novels! ObL was a fanatical fundamentalist who had no use for an infidel like Saddam. The two had no relationship whatever. In fact, they almost certainly hated each other. The evidence that Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda consisted of one imaginary meeting in Prague between Muhammed Atta, the Egyptian student who organized the 9/11 attacks, and an Iraqi agent. This meeting never happened, and everyone knew it. However, that was not the big lie.

I came to recognize the actual big lie when I was sitting in the Burger King at the Kansas City airport a year or two after the initiation of the fiasco in Iraq. At a nearby table were a young couple, their two children, and an older couple who evidently were the grandparents. The striking thing to me was that the young adults were both dressed in camos and combat boots. They were evidently both in the military, and they were about to be deployed. What of the kids? I could only surmise that they would be staying with the grandparents. At least, I hoped so.

I was in the army during the tail end of our nation’s last major fiasco — Vietnam. I had been drafted, and the non-lifers that I knew had either been drafted or had volunteered to avoid the draft. A few of them were married, but of the hundreds of guys whom I encountered, I can only remember one person — an extremely poor fellow from Mississippi who joined up because it was the best job that he could find — who had any children. In those days having a wife and kids exempted a young man from the draft. Needless to say, the wife was already exempt because she was female, and women in those days were too weak or too hysterical or something to be trusted with fighting our wars. I had never even heard a rumor of a family that included children in which both parents were in the service and were shipped off to ‘Nam. Such a thing would have been just short of inconceivable.

So, the scene at the Burger King had a dramatic effect on me. How, I wondered, would the family explain to the children why both mommy and daddy had to leave them behind for several months. The answer was, of course, quite simple. They would almost certainly be told that mommy and daddy needed to go to Iraq to defend America. That was the big lie. The deception was originally started by Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of them, but it then became interwoven into the fabric of families all across America. No one would tell the children that their parents were leaving them behind because they were being well paid by the administration to implement the incredibly costly invasion of a country the ruler of which had never had the slightest intention of attacking America. He had just made the mistake of getting on the wrong side of a few people in Washington who took advantage of a two-bit terrorist attack to implement a grudge that they had been nursing for decades.

What happens when the children learn about the big lie? I suppose that a few will be disgusted with their parents’ choices, but most of them will probably still think of them as heroic figures who made a big sacrifice that saved the rest of us from the bad guys.

Eleventh Century Liars

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You cannot even trust monks and priests. Continue reading →

Life in Europe was certainly different in the Middle Ages. Education, for example, was almost totally restricted to only one group of people, the monks. The most obvious effect of this isolation was the fact that nearly all Europeans — even the clergy and the nobility — were completely illiterate. Everything that anyone understood about the world was filtered through the monasteries. The monks decided both what knowledge should be provided to the current generation and what knowledge should be left for the next one.

A slightly less obvious effect involves historians of the era. Nearly everything that was written about the early middle ages was recorded by monks. If every monk had been unbiased and scrupulously honest, the record would still be hopelessly flawed because monasteries were not ubiquitous, and some monasteries kept much more complete records than others. In fact, however, the picture of the monk as a saintly tonsured scribe dutifully recording the activities of the day using the highest standards of modern journalism is laughable. Everything that was written was composed for some specific purpose, and veracity often took a back seat to persuasiveness.

Two examples can illustrate this point. The first is the case of Ademar of Chabanne, who lived from 989 to 1034. Ademar became enamored of the efforts of the monks of Limoges to promote the reputation of St. Martial, who had been sent to the Aquitaine region of France by Pope Fabian in the third century. Martial became the first Bishop of Limoge. The young monk took to heart the stories that were going around that Martial had been one of the original apostles and had actually witnessed the Last Supper and Pentecost. Ademar spearheaded a project to rewrite the official history of the saint to transport him back in time a couple of hundred years. He also implemented important changes, additions, and deletions to other historical documents that were in the possession of the abbey in Limoges to accord with this fiction.

Unfortunately for Ademar, some itinerant monks saw through his scheme and publicly humiliated him. Ademar, however, did not give up. Instead, he redoubled his efforts, but he did not make his work public. Instead, he secreted away all of his writing in the abbey’s scriptorium, where they were discovered approximately one generation later. By then Ademar had been dead for some time, and evidently no one remembered the fact that his respect for the truth had been severely called into question.

In fact, as incredible as it may seem, for nine centuries Ademar’s version of history was used as the basis of many historical analyses. Because he wrote well, he wrote a great deal — including a history of Aquitaine from the time of Charlemagne up to his day — and because he was one of the very few people in Aquitaine who put anything at all to parchment in the eleventh century, Ademar’s writings were not questioned for 900 years. Even after he was outed in the 1920’s as an inveterate liar, historians continued to quoted him.

Why would Ademar help promote a story that he almost certainly knew was a lie? Well, the cathedral in Limoges contained the relics of St. Martial. Pilgrims had always flocked to it as a holy site, but once the news spread of the saint’s reputation as one of Jesus’ companions, the number grew substantially. For a short while Ademar played an important role in the aggrandizement of the diocese, the community, and his monastery.

Richard Landes wrote a very entertaining account of this entire episode. You can read it here.

Another example is Ralph (sometimes called Raoul or Rudolph) Glaber, a monk who lived in the very famous monastery at Cluny, at least for a while. His most celebrated work is a five-volume history of the period 800-1040. Despite the fact that Glaber’s tome is replete with errors, it is difficult to find any historical work about the early middle ages that does not rely on it in one way or another. If nothing else, it is thorough. This is the work that popularized the fanciful notion that people freaked out as the year 1000 approached.

The last pope of the period about which Glaber wrote was Benedict IX. One would certainly expect that any Christian historian would be fairly knowledgeable about a contemporary Supreme Pontiff. At one point in his history, however, Glaber reports that Benedict was only ten-years-old when he became pontiff. Later in the same work he claims that Benedict was twelve when he assumed the throne. Both of these claims are now considered outrageously wrong. There is no record of Benedict’s date of birth, but we do know a good bit about his father, who held several important offices in Rome, and most historians now are confident that Benedict was no younger than twenty when he took the throne.

What these two men have in common is that they were both French monks. That not only gave them access to pen and parchment; it made them part of a community that was very active politically in the eleventh century. The idea that monks were men devoted to finding God in various mundane ways is grossly insufficient for explaining their role the eleventh century. The monks — particularly those at Cluny — were actively working to promote peace in Europe and to “reform” the Church, which, in the end, meant taking over the papacy. It was no coincidence that the last three popes of the century were monks with ties to Cluny.

So, if this were put in terms of political parties, in the first part of the century, the party of the noble Roman families controlled the papacy. In the middle, the emperor, with the support of the monks, appointed a few popes. In the last few decades, the monastic party held sway and brought the Church back to its Christian roots. At least that is what the history books say. On the other hand, one must remember that the monks wrote those histories, and some of those last few popes had so little power that they dared not set foot in Rome. During that time another man — now considered an anti-pope — was running the Church and claiming to be pope.