“Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hypocrisy”
April 21, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
Before Muhammad, before Jesus, and even before Buddha, there was the Greek storyteller, Aesop, who has had the singular literary success of having his stories repeated, especially to children, for 25 centuries.
People of my generation all know the story about the boy who cried “wolf.” Aesop tells us about a young man who was tasked with watching over the village’s herd of sheep during the day, a singularly boring job, and so, to create some excitement, the boy cried out to the villagers that a wolf was coming to attack the sheep. Of course, he got a big reaction but when there was no wolf in sight, he was scolded. But later boredom set in again, and he again cried “wolf,” and as this happened over and over, eventually, the villagers ignored him so that when a wolf actually did come to kill the sheep, none of the villagers responded when the boy called for help, so that many of their sheep were lost.
Hyperbole, exaggeration, can be useful literarily tools as long as such inflation is not overused. We know that Julia Robert’s smile is not really a mile wide and that none of you have every been hungry enough to eat a horse, but we know what is meant by this kind of hyperbole. But it is best when used sparingly.
In this, the 15th presidential election of my memory, I am aware that politicians have been crying “wolf” way too often. Of course, the 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was trumpeted as the most important election of a lifetime but even back then, such hyperbole was not reserved for presidential elections only.
A hundred years ago, a Tennessee newspaper, the Greeneville Democrat-Sun, described their coming vote as being “the most important election in the history of the county will … when Greene County will be called on to vote $200,000 for the purpose of resurfacing the roads.”
So, I am not sure how to go about recovering the language of imperative after it has been so abused for hundreds of years, but folks, we are six months away from a presidential election that could, in very fact, be the last free and open democratic election in the United States. Our nation is in such grave peril, it is incomprehensible that it even needs to be said. But, evidently, it does.
In previous years, I considered myself to be a fairly astute political observer, but I have to confess that now I do not understand the world that I live in. I have always been a political liberal, for which I would credit my childhood in Christian Sunday School. Clearly, I was hearing something that my peers in rural Kentucky did not. The Bible I grew up reading was decisively anti-war, it taught compassion and charity towards the poor and the sick, it told me to welcome immigrants, to oppose racism, to be sexually circumspect, and to always tell the truth.
Inexplicably, I grew up in the same part of the world with the same religious indoctrination as Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, with markedly different outcomes.
So, naturally, I thought the election contest between Ronald Regan and Jimmy Carter would be the most important of my life. Then I thought the contest between the war criminal, George W. Bush and the war protestor, John Kerry was the most important race in my lifetime.
I didn’t think that the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was all that important because there was no way that more than a dozen people in America could possibly be tricked into voting for Donald Trump. I and a whole lot of other people were wrong about that one. I watched the election returns that year from Belize where I was scuba diving with my daughter. My Asian daughter cried and for the first time in our lives, she referenced her race saying, “I don’t want to be brown in Trump’s America.” We were stunned.
I consoled my daughter then saying that Trump would only be in office for a month or so. He was such an obvious con man, a sexual predator, a liar, and criminal that he would have to be impeached almost immediately. I was wrong about a lot of things in politics that year and I have felt like a stranger in America ever since.
I even said to many friends in 2020 that I was relieved that since Trump was voted out of office that we could safely turn on the national news and never hear his name mentioned again. Trump made me ashamed to be American, and I was traveling to speak in Great Britain frequently in those years and there was no shortage of people who wanted to remind me of why I should be ashamed of what my country had become. But, when Biden took office, I felt like there would never be a reason to mention Trump in the news again unless someone happened to kill him in whatever prison he was in following the insurrection. My apologies to any of you who ever believed that I was smart.
I clearly do not have my finger on the pulse of the American voter! But I have speculated several times over the past seven or eight years as to how voters were seduced into voting for a philandering, uneducated, dishonest, con man because his affirmation of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia validates the dark shadow, the id, that lies in many of us.
But earlier this month Jeffery Goldberg published an article in the Atlantic that looked at the cowardice demonstrated by many Republican political leaders, elected officials, many with first rate educations and years of public service experience, who just seemed to have allowed their character, their judgement, and their morals to just collapse at the feet of Donald Trump.
There were 43 Republican senators who had to run for their lives on January 6, 2021. They came back to the desecrated Capitol Building late that night to finish their work of confirming Joe Biden’s election, amid the millions of dollars of damage and feces smeared statues. Many stood up and railed at Donald Trump’s election lies, his refusal to do what every other American president has done, which is to demonstrate the strength of our democracy in a peaceful transfer of power.
Instead, Trump called upon supporters from across the country to come and help him to “stop the steal” by storming the Capitol, beating down doors and beating armed police who had been ordered not to shoot the rioters. Had this insurrection happened a couple of generations ago, hundreds, if not thousands, of the rioters would have been shot and, I believe, Trump and many members of his family and administration would have been quickly executed after being found guilty of treason.
One protestor was shot before she could break into the room where elected officials were hiding, Eventually, order was restored and many protestors were arrested and tried for their crimes but Republican leaders who so forcefully denounced Trump on the evening of January 6th, by the time it came to vote on impeachment, a very mild and humane response to a national tragedy that we all watched unfolding before our own eyes on TV and which these senators saw in person from their hiding places, all 43 voted against impeachment in what has to be the most colossal display of cowardice and hypocrisy in American history.
The voting public may have a very short memory but educated and experienced members of the legislature knew that what they experienced was treason, insurrection, an attack on our constitution and the free democracy it creates but out of fear and lust for power, they pretended that what they had seen with their own eyes, what they had heard and experienced, was not as bad as they knew that it was.
The rioters erected a hangman’s noose on the Capitol grounds to hang the vice president, Mike Pence, but if these events had taken place just a decade or two ago, surely it would have been Trump and his minions who would have been executed.
There may be some voters who are so deceived by conspiracy theories and the MAGA/Q-anon cult that they can’t see it, but you know that short of a couple of rather challenged Republicans on the hill, you know that they all know that it is true . . . Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and most of the others… they know that they have turned their backs on America, on democracy, in order to stay in power. None of them deserve to hold elected office or, in my opinion, a drivers license.
The lust for power has remarkably extended to a kind of misogyny that I cannot even understand. We have debated the issue of abortion for years but sadly, to most people, it seemed like a tempest in a tea pot. No one but radical Catholics and Fundamentalists really wanted to take away the constitutionally protected right of a woman to manage her own reproductive life but that tiny minority was loud and persistent. Republican president after Republican president had promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade but they never meant it and they never did it, but Trump did it and he didn’t really care about the issue. One can only wonder how many abortions he has paid for through the years to avoid paying child support from births from his many affairs. But he appointed judges who were willing to do it.
And in a fit of undiluted hypocrisy, the longest sitting justice, Clarence Thomas, not only voted to overturn Roe but in his comments on the decision he said that the court should also take up previous decisions that legalized same sex marriage and even contraception. How is that fact not being discussed in the news every day?
Thomas, who was revealed to have tried to start an in office affair with Anita Hill by telling her lurid stories about porn videos he had watched, now wants to legislate Catholic moral standards into law so that all of us who are not Catholic have to abide by the teachings of a Church that he blatantly ignored himself when he was younger.
We have all heard the pushback against the pro-life movement, pointing out that if they were really pro-life that they would favor free child care, universal healthcare, and they would want to outlaw the guns so commonly used to kill children in school. And folks, this is not an argument. For there to be an argument, there has to be two plausible sides to the issue. There is no defense for being anti-abortion while also opposing social support and protection for children after they are born. This is just religious and political hypocrisy . . . there is no argument to be made here.
I have never said much about Thomas Jefferson’s often repeated quote about how erecting a wall between the church and the state is essential in a free society. In fact, I might have thought this concern was rather dated. Churches can freely advocate for causes, either for women’s rights or in opposition to abortion, in favor of gay rights or in opposition to them, but churches don’t get to legislate.
But Clarence Thomas, in a curiously hypocritical religious passion, actually does want to write Catholic values into law. Why would anyone care if gay people are allowed to marry one another? Why would anyone want to prevent a woman from having access to contraception? Why, well, it isn’t a happy story but the “why” is as old as religion’s desire to control women, to control their reproduction, control their sex lives, and to make sure that straight marriage was the only legal option. None of which is any of their business and it should shock, horrify, and motivate all of us to realize that this is, in fact, the most important election of our lifetime and for reasons that make no sense at all, it is an election that very well may go the wrong way! Why would anyone who is not a billionaire vote for Trump’s economic policies? Why would anyone who isn’t a right wing, lunatic, fundamentalist vote for Trump’s misogynistic policies? Why would anyone re-elect any one of the 43 Republican senators who failed to impeach Trump in 2021? Why would anyone who loves democracy vote for anyone who has clearly demonstrated in their holding up aid to Ukraine that they support the re-establishment of the Soviet Union under Putin?
I cannot believe that this is America. And I can tell you, people in Europe can’t believe that this is America. The only two people in Asia and Europe who are happy about Trump’s popularity are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian president, Vladimir Putin; both of whom are despots who have refused to leave office when their constitutional term in office was over, and both are tyrants that Trump envies because he tried to not leave office and failed and will surely try again if given the chance. Putin wants to take the Ukraine and you know that he will not stop there. Xi Jinping wants to take Taiwan and you know that he will not stop there.
Everything that spiritually conscious people value is in danger as voters in the world’s last great superpower and economic engine go back into the ballot box where a possible majority may embrace disaster. No one should sit this one out. No one should downplay the importance of this November’s election.
And no one should vote to take away rights from women, minorities, immigrants, or any of the rest of us who are clinging to hope for a sane world.
