Today’s Morning Jolt is about the proliferation of lies in our politics, and I had a point that didn’t quite fit in an edition of the newsletter that was running long.
I think the act of lying reveals something beyond a belief that the truth is negotiable; I think it often reveals a fear that the truth isn’t sufficient, that a careful examination of the facts won’t bring people to the preferred conclusion. To use a few of the examples from the Jolt, if Karine Jean-Pierre genuinely felt that Joe Biden’s health and age are fine, she wouldn’t feel the need to gild the lily and claim “I can’t even keep up with him.” If Biden was confident he had never made a significant or consequential error with classified documents, he wouldn’t claim “people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.” If the events surrounding the spy balloon were self-evidently a humiliation for China, Chuck Schumer wouldn’t feel the need to tell us it was such a humiliation for that regime.
Every lie is a little bit of an act of desperation, a fear of the truth. Because when the truth is on your side, you generally don’t feel any need to improve upon it by embellishing it! But I suppose there are rare exceptions.
A few years ago, Amazon debuted a streaming series, Hunters, a wildly exaggerated and oddly flippant account of American vigilantes who hunt down Nazis in the 1970s. In the series, they featured a flashback scene where Nazis used Jewish prisoners to act out a game of chess, with fatal consequences for the pieces taken off the board.
Except . . . that never happened. The Nazis tortured and killed the Jews in all kinds of horrific, stomach-turning, monstrous ways, but they never made them play human chess. The Auschwitz Memorial was unimpressed, declaring, “inventing a fake game of human chess for [the series] is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”
That bizarre and tasteless storytelling choice stuck with me, for the basic question: They’re writing a story about Nazis . . . and they had to make up an imaginary way they tortured Jews during the Holocaust? The truth wasn’t bad enough for them?