Living in a World Built on All-American
Lies
Disinformation has triumphed in our all-American
world, the most notable being the lies that
sparked our "forever wars." Is there any room
left for moral courage in this context?
By Kelly Denton-Borhaug
August
17, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Recent episodes of
purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought
to my mind the latest verbal
lapse by George
W. Bush, the president who hustled this country
into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11
attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a
public confession about his own warmongering in
Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring.
Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir
Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush
inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his
own presidential war-making in exactly the same
boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he
described “the decision of one man to launch a
wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq — I mean of
Ukraine.”
Initially, he seemed shocked that he had blurted
that out and tried to back off his slip by
shrugging and muttering, “Iraq, too,” as if it
were a joke. Some in his audience even laughed.
But his initial attempt to sideline his comment
only deepened the hole he was in. Then
he tried another ploy. He suggested that his
slip could be forgiven or excused because of his
age, 75, and that his invasion and the
destruction of Iraq could now be forgiven
because of his cognitive decline. All in all, it
was a first-class mess.
An Earlier
Pathetic Attempt at Comedy
I
remember another of Bush’s attempted jokes that
got an immediate laugh from his audience, but
soon fell seriously flat. It was in 2004. The
Iraq War was underway and the president was at
the yearly dinner of
the Radio and Television Correspondents
Association, a black-tie event attended by both
journalists and politicians.
After various comedy sketches, then-President
Bush rose to
present a short meant-to-be humorous slideshow
featuring himself supposedly looking for the
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Remember that, in the
lead-up to war there, Americans were hammered
with fearful and deceptive
political messaging,
emphasizing that only an invasion could stop
that country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, from
having WMD. (None were ever found, of course.)
At that dinner, Bush showed photos of himself
supposedly searching for those devastating
weapons in the Oval Office beneath a cushion on
the couch and under the desk. “No weapons under
there! Maybe they’re here!” said the smiling
president repeatedly in a sing-song voice, as if
engaged in a child’s game. Horrifyingly enough,
many in that audience of journalists did indeed
laugh.
I
was offended then, just as I was by Bush’s
recent slip and his sorry attempts to minimize
and excuse his responsibility for the blood on
his hands, the massive death toll from his
invasion, and so much additional destruction and
suffering. According to The Costs of
War project, more than 207,000
Iraqi civilians were
killed in that nightmare, while the number who
died from the indirect violence of that war was
far higher, given the damage done to the Iraqi
health care system and the rest of that
devastated country’s infrastructure. More than
20 years later, people are still dying
needlessly. And I also mourn the more than 7,000
U.S. servicemembers who
died in the post-9/11 war zones Bush created, as
well as the many more who were wounded.
I can’t
help but wonder if George Bush doesn’t feel at
least a little of this himself. Otherwise, why
would he have made such a slip? Or maybe it
wasn’t a slip at all, but an inadvertent
confession.
That his telling gaffe about Iraq and Ukraine
received so little attention certainly reveals
something about our media’s ongoing uneasiness
with Bush’s wars and perhaps the conflicted
feelings of our citizenry as well when it comes
to what they did (and didn’t do) during the Iraq
War. How many who were initially enthusiastic
about the Afghan and Iraq wars would now, like
their former president, admit we were wrong?
How many people who supported those conflicts
have taken what happened to heart and are
thinking more deeply about an American
propensity for war and the war
culture that
goes with it? Like George W. Bush, too few, I’m
afraid.
Worshipping Lies
This past July 24th, the New York Times featured
“I
was wrong”
op-ed pieces by a number of its columnists. The
editors defined “being wrong” as “incorrect
predictions and bad advice,” as well as “being
off the mark.” Of course, one of the definitions
of the Greek word for “sin” (amartia) in
the New Testament is “missing the mark.”
Fascinating.
I would
have taken the editors’ definitions further
though. Saying “I was wrong” means more than
“rethinking our positions on all kinds of
issues,” as the Times suggested. Often,
the problem isn’t simply that people lack the
best, most up-to-date information or data. Only
by digging into ethics and social psychology
will we better understand why people deceive not
just others but even themselves with
lies, slippery rationalizations, or
comedic attempts at distraction to cover up
deeper dynamics that have to do with privilege
and power, or what religious traditions
sometimes call “worshipping false idols.”
Moral psychologist Albert
Bandera has
explored some of the diverse mechanisms people
rely on to morally disengage and excuse inhumane
conduct. They shift their rhetoric and thinking
to redefine and even rename what they are doing,
“sanitizing” language (and their acts) in the
process. In this way, they often shift
responsibility onto someone else, minimize any
damaging consequences for themselves, and
dehumanize the victims of the violence they’ve
let loose.
But there are other examples of moral
disengagement that are even harder to
understand. In such cases, people make decisions
and act in ways that even undercut their own
self-interest and values. For me, one of the
saddest recent examples is Stephen
Ayres, a
witness at the House select committee’s January
6th hearings this summer. He had been part of
the Trumpist mob that stormed the Capitol. A
family man who, until then, owned a house and
had a job with a cabinet company, Ayres came
across in those hearings as a lost soul who
couldn’t fully comprehend how he had willingly
injured himself and his family by idolizing
Donald Trump and his election lies.
His arrest for participating in the insurrection
resulted in the loss of almost everything he
had. With his wife sitting behind him, he
testified about
having to sell his house, losing his job, and
struggling to come to terms with his actions. “I
wish I had done my own research,” he said,
trying to explain how he could have been so
easily deceived by Trumpist lies regarding the
2020 presidential election.
Clearly, the social media bubble he slipped into
that captivated and compelled him to head for
Washington had given his life new meaning and an
otherwise missing sense of excitement. He hadn’t
planned to enter the Capitol building that day
but was swept away by the moment. “Basically, we
were just following what [Trump] said,” Ayres
testified. In handing over his critical thinking
to right-wing social media and a president
intent on hanging onto power at any cost, he
unwittingly also handed over his capacity for
moral deliberation and, in the end, his very
life.
Liz
Cheney’s Struggle for Moral Clarity
In recent weeks, Liz
Cheney,
vice-chairperson of the January 6th committee,
was questioned about
a past moral choice of hers by Leslie Stahl in
a 60 Minutes interview — specifically,
how years ago she threw her lesbian sister and
family under the bus for political purposes. It
was a time when Cheney was struggling to get
elected in conservative Wyoming. That
meant coming out as anti-LGBTQ. Now, she says,
“I was wrong” to have condemned her sister then.
Listening to her, I wanted to hear more about
such moral grappling and how, in these years,
her convictions had or hadn’t changed when it
came to people, religion, family, political
life, power, and the role her father played as
George W. Bush’s vice president in those
godforsaken wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Unfortunately, Stahl didn’t push her further.
I
disagree with Liz Cheney on almost every policy
position she’s taken in these years.
Nonetheless, I find myself grateful for her
rejection of Donald Trump’s mad election claims
and her determined, even steely, leadership of
the January 6th committee hearings.
Cheney eventually discovered her moral bearings
on her sister’s sexual orientation and family
life. Now, I wonder if that past moral struggle
influenced her decision to throw political
expediency to the wind regarding her own House
seat in a Wyoming
primary that
she might lose on August 16th. After all, by
resisting the Trumpian tide, she’s become one of
the few Republicans willing to do some serious
truth-telling.
Today, Cheney finds herself in another league
from most of her party’s leaders and power
players. In the state where I live,
Pennsylvania, Republicans are coalescing behind
the candidacy of Doug Mastriano for governor.
Candidate Mastriano not only wants to arm
school employees, but
according to my local
newspaper, he
even organized buses for January 6th, now “rubs
shoulders with QAnon conspiracy theorists,” and
until recently had an active
social media account at
Gab, a site well-known for its white supremacist
and anti-semitic rhetoric.
Mastriano continues to spread Trump’s lies about
the 2020 election, is a Christian nationalist,
and believes in an abortion ban without
exceptions, and the list goes on and on.
Nonetheless, Republicans like Andy Reilly, a
member of the state GOP national committee, rationalize
their support for
Mastriano by saying things like, “When you play
team sports, you learn what being part of a team
means… Our team voted for him in the primary.”
Lying to
Others and Oneself
What enables such self-deception? According to
journalist Mark Leibovich, author of Thank
You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s
Washington and the Price of Submission, what “made
Trump possible”
even after the January 6th insurrection was
“rationalization followed by capitulation and
then full surrender.” Reviewing Leibovich’s
book, Geoffrey Kabaservice added
this: “The
routine was always numbingly the same, and so
was the sad truth at the heart of it. They all
knew better.” In other words, “knowing better”
doesn’t assure anyone of doing the right thing.
Instead, too many Americans were swayed by
“greed, ambition, opportunism, fear, and
fascination of Trump as a pure and feral
rascal.”
Tim Miller, author of Why
We Did It: Travelogue from the Republican Road
to Hell,
adds “hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and
self-deception” to the mix of reasons why so
many politicians do what they do. “How do people
justify going along?” he asks. But he, too,
played that game once upon a time. A Republican
gay man with a husband, he rationalized helping
the GOP pass anti-LGBTQ legislation by “compartmentalizing”
his personal life from his professional one. As
he now says, “Being around power, being addicted
to power,” along with the insatiable compulsion
to “be in the room where it happens,” is a
recipe that leads people to act
self-deceptively, while deceiving others.
It’s like placing scales over
your own eyes and those of others, to blind as
many people as possible, yourself included, to
the immorality of your acts. And some lie even
more to themselves, claiming that they can
resist the worst tendencies of destructive
power-mongering. They say, “We need to have good
people in the room” to stop the worst from
happening, even as they capitulate to power
players and justify what should never be
justified.
Many of
us are waiting to hear an “I was wrong” from so
many politicians (though I can’t imagine Donald
Trump ever succumbing to honesty), including
most of the Republican leadership. Just for
starters, I’d like to hear “I was wrong”
regarding Muslim bans, the demonization of
immigrants, the refusal to seriously address gun
violence, the denial of women’s human rights,
the gerrymandering and weakening of voting
rights, religious nativism, and sidling up to
white supremacy, not to speak of the supposed
“steal” of the 2020 election. But given the
likelihood that people in power will lie to
themselves and others, I’m not holding my
breath.
Telling
the Truth about U.S. Military Spending
What I’m also waiting for is an “I was wrong”
from both Democratic and Republican politicians
in Washington who, year after year, support ever
more outlandish military
budgets,
despite so many other existential
crises in our
country and on the planet, despite the
death-dealing costs of war to the servicemembers Americans
claim to highly esteem, and despite the fact
that our violence abroad
simply hasn’t worked.
Remember that the United States spends more
than half of its entire discretionary federal
budget on militarization and war, a
tally greater
than the military budgets of the next nine
highest-spending countries combined. Tragically,
it doesn’t appear that this will change any time
soon.
According to an analysis by the anti-corruption
group Public
Citizen ,
in 2022, the congressional armed services
committees only added to the already gigantic
military budget the Biden administration
requested for 2023. The House added another
$37.5 billion, while the Senate added $45
billion. Our leaders refuse to learn from the
last decades of unremitting war. Instead, power
and privilege continue to hold sway.
As the
same report explained, after
military-industrial-complex corporations donated
$10 million to congressional armed services
committee members, “the Department of Defense
received a potential $45 billion spending
increase.” This was in addition to the
president’s $813 billion recommendation. The
report concluded, “The defense contractors will
have clinched a return on its $10 million
investment of nearly 450,000%.”
It’s
discouraging to see how deception and
rationalization so regularly undermine truth and
moral courage. It’s also sobering to witness
individuals who willingly lie to themselves and,
in doing so, subvert their own and others’
wellbeing. But I’m also encouraged by times
when, as with Liz Cheney on that committee, some
of us demonstrate what it means to dig deeply
for moral clarity against the prevailing
headwinds of moral disengagement,
disinformation, power, and privilege.
The
fact is that truth-telling and confession, while
difficult, are good for the soul. I wish for
more and hope it will be enough. God knows, all
of us and this beleaguered planet truly need
it.
Copyright 2022 Kelly Denton-Borhaug
Kelly Denton-Borhaug,
a TomDispatch regular,
has long been investigating how religion and
violence collide in American war-culture. She
teaches in the global religions department at
Moravian University. She is the author of two
books, U.S.
War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation and,
more recently, And
Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S.
War-Culture.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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