Paladino and the truth

Francis Bacon's famous essay "On Truth" begins: "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

Fred Dicker, commenting on the radio about his Bolton brouhaha with Carl Paladino, accused the Republican gubernatorial candidate of blatantly lying, and for all I know the pugnacious Post columnist may be right. Nor would I want to take Pilate's approach in defending Paladino.

But Dicker's charge would have more potency if most ordinary people did not assume politicians are liars. While pundits often dispute that assumption, there is no denying, this campaign season, that the swirl of negative advertising from both sides does not just fall short of the truth, but actively seeks to undermine it. There is no pretense of fairness, of seeking to honestly engage and refute your opponent's best arguments, but rather wholesale distortion.

And anyone who questions this behavior, and suggests there is a moral obligation to engage in more uplifting debate, will be dismissed as hopelessly naive, and as missing the more interesting question of how it all plays out in the campaign.

Comments

[Brian]

The thing with Paladino is that he's putting this truth halo on himself, saying that he may be politically incorrect but at least he speaks truth. If he's seen as a boor AND a liar, I don't see what appeal remains.

[Johannah Turner]

"...Anderson [Sherwood Anderson, who in 1934 took a trip across the country and wrote a book called PUZZLED AMERICA] found 'A hunger for belief, a determination to believe in one another, in the leadership we're likely to get out of a democracy.'

"A hunger for belief is certainly no less today than it was then. It is the nature of belief that may have changed. In the time lapse, new phenomena have taken over our lives and psyches: the cold war, the sanctity of the military, union-busting beyond precedent (encouraged by the cravenness of labor's pooh-bahs), along with televised sound-bites offered with the regularity of a cuckoo clock and a press that has assiduously followed the dictum of Sam Rayburn: To get along, go along. As a result, reflective conversations concerning these matters have become suspect, or at best, the avocation of odd birds, vestigial remainders of a long-ago past."

--Studs Terkel, THE GREAT DIVIDE: Second Thoughts on The American Dream, 1988.

[Terry O'Neill, Esq.]

One thinks of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk (equivalent to a modern crusading and single-mindedly ambitious AG)and quite a miserable person to be ruled by. The people of Uruk beseeched the gods to deliver them from his wonkish policy books, boring speeches and pretentious pronunciation of the city's name as Nyoo-ruk. The gods responded by sending the wild man (i.e. anyone from north of Westchester County) Enkidu to do battle with Gilgamesh. They battled back and forth before the gates of the city for a very long time. Then they decided to bury the hatchet and became the best of friends.

[Bob Conner]

Nice one, Terry.