Honoré Victorin Daumier:
A Young Man to Whom Nothing is Sacred,
plate 8 from Professeurs Et Moutards (1846)

"We will be inaugurating the lamest duck in our country's history …"

In courts of law in this country, witnesses are compelled to swear to tell "the whole truth and NothingBut." Consequently, telling falsehoods can result in a perjury charge for lying to the jury. Outside of court, nobody holds anybody to such stringent expectations. We all can get a little loose with literal truths, but most of us work hard to avoid materially misrepresenting ourselves if only because few want to be fairly characterized as loose with the truth. We rely upon each other to fairly represent our experiences, so it’s scandalous, if not strictly illegal when a private citizen routinely misrepresents himself. Further, deliberate misrepresentation tends to introduce a parody of a response as repeated attempts to uncover the truth produce responses intended to cloak it further. These interactions resemble old I Love Lucy episodes from the fifties but are not nearly so entertaining.

As of this writing, our current President, Joe Biden, has kept his promise to tell The People the truth. He has had an awful lot of really terrific news to share during his tenure, but even when the news was grim, he never once tried to misrepresent the fact for his or anybody's benefit. He has been a reliable public servant. Further, he charged his entire administration to respect their fellow administrators, threatening immediate dismissal for anyone harassing another. He has proven to be a reliable witness, not that his opposition ever recognized him as such. It was so bad for them that they had to lie for him. They accomplished this by characterizing what he'd done as something other than what he'd done. They did this through their extensive anti-social media networks, including Faux Snooze. Their candidate, who never admitted that he lost the election Biden won, continued lying about Biden's accomplishments from day one. To hear the President-elect's story, one might think the country had open borders, that we were in the throes of a genuinely terrible economic depression, and that people were dying unemployed in the streets. None of those stories had even a thread of truth in them. Our President-elect continued repeating them, and his followers apparently believed him enough to elect him.

The object might have been to condition the population so they could no longer recognize the truth and NothingBut. This tactic worked like magic for a while in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and every other authoritarian country in modern history. Eventually, even the best-meaning people grew tired of continually rebutting and focused their attention on anything less controversial. Those countries went to Hell, of course, without the beneficient influence of truths. It was left to a resistance to keep up the maintenance, an onerous and often underappreciated occupation. Our misrepresenters, cheered on by the soon-to-be President, have already begun their work. The President-elect inherits the best economy in anybody's memory, but he's sworn to undo whatever his predecessor accomplished. This will make matters much worse, which, of course, will naturally necessitate more lies to cover up the self-incriminating truth. Loyal cultists will gobble up those misrepresentations as if they were bonbons. An us-vs-them dichotomy will very quickly emerge where anyone not swallowing the latest rubber worm will be publicly characterized as a) socialist, b) communist, c) Democrat, or d) unpatriotic. A loyalty test will be embedded in every interaction, asking if you're for or against. It will not feel safe to disclose your position to strangers.

It will be incumbent upon us, then, to maintain our standards. As bold-faced as our prospective President has been, we'll need to match or better him. We will be responsible for maintaining the bold-faced truth and NothingBut. He will very likely serve as the NuthingBut Misrepresentations chief executive, as we do not very fondly remember him from the last time he was president. He seemed incapable of telling even small, simple truths, for he had so tangled his administration up in lies from his first hour in office that he could never after that again afford to tell even a straightforward fact. He spun everything through a reverse washing machine, sullying the results.

I came of age in a country like that, where our President steadfastly played loosely with the facts. We were not told the truth about Vietnam. We knew the truth anyhow. We knew because we maintained an underground. We lost our faith in our government under the careful tutelage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, a definite pair to draw to, neither of which held the slightest compunction about withholding any inconvenient truth. By the time they were elected, they'd buried enough bodies to spend lifetimes in prison, but they were never charged. By the time they left office, they'd successfully bid down their charges to time served without serving a second behind bars. We survived those times. We drew from our experience to survive the Reagan years, too, though they very nearly financially ruined us. The lies escalated under Reagan. While the Republican majority in the House insisted that Clinton was destroying our economy, he turned out to be the only President in modern history actually to balance the Federal budget. This, too, was properly characterized as a failure by the next lying Republican to take office, who succeeded in side-stepping Gore's truly Inconvenient Truths to embrace more convenient lies. Bush's eight years rekindled every lie and added many, for he'd managed to engage in a war nobody could win. Maintaining face in light of that fiasco demanded tremendous lying. He was born again enough to understand how to pull that off. Cheney helped.

They appear sanctified when they're lying. They can often convincingly portray themselves as holier than anybody. They recruit disreputable clergy to sit at their head tables to verify their lies, which they seem anxious to endorse, perhaps because they shave their own truths to survive. When immersed in such a system, the great danger lies in becoming cynical in response. One must seek to know enough to fully justify becoming cynical but always steadfastly choose not to because cynicism is another one of those self-inflicted wounds. The cynic forfeits any ability to improve anything by simply acquiescing to their presumed powerlessness. It turns out that when the powerful choose to become cynical, they render themselves powerless. It's a paradox: because you feel powerless, you choose to become cynical and thereby render yourself as truly powerless as you feel. Only someone as natively powerful as you and I can speak truth to power. Only the weak rely upon lies to maintain their semblance of power. The liars remain scions of near absolute powerlessness, regardless of how they might appear. They fear we will know. We know. We will be inaugurating the lamest duck in our country's history, and it will be incumbent upon us to concoct ways to maintain our sacred democracy until he manages to self-destruct. He will probably ultimately topple off the top of his accumulated NuthingButs.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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