One of our correspondents this week, Michael Spielman, was provoked by my last column to unleash his own set of language beefs, which have him screaming at his TV, he says. He wants us to become vigilant about grammatically inept speakers and shout them down when they use the wrong pronoun.
I think there’s more going on here than grammar dyspepsia. Almost everyone I have heard from over the last week has been in a state of high anxiety. Even people who are usually the most centered and unflappable have seemed off-kilter.
Take Dennis, our steadiest columnist, whose view of the world from Provincetown’s East End is unfailingly generous and warm. Not this week. Gentle Dennis is ready to smack somebody.
It’s Trump, of course, who has come to embody what Paul Krugman calls “the war on truth.” Krugman says that when he started writing his New York Times column 20 years ago “my editors told me that it wasn’t acceptable to use the word ‘lie’ when writing about presidential candidates.” Trump put an end to that editorial prohibition.
Much has been written about Trump’s lying and how pervasive it is. It looks as if the Washington Post’s fact checkers last updated the number of falsehoods spoken or tweeted by the president on Aug. 27, when the tally stood at 22,247.
The sight and sound of a man in such a powerful position who routinely and casually lies about almost everything is unspeakably disturbing. Yet this kind of personality is not unheard of. Dostoevsky described him in 1879 in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov:
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.”
Krugman warns us about Trump’s biggest and most dangerous lie: that this week’s election is a fraud, with millions of illegal votes cast for Joe Biden — just as he has falsely claimed for four years that millions voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.
As I write this, we are sending our reporters to the polls to watch the ritual that citizens have solemnly and honorably pursued here for 400 years. Despite our differences, we trust each other to count votes truthfully, in public, and abide by the results. That this civic rite could be corrupted by Trump’s lies should move us all to recommit ourselves to curiosity and truth-seeking.
