The Obama thing

The very first column I wrote for WORLDin 1998, when the second-to-last page in the magazine was still called “Soul Food,” started like this:

“I was 16 when I became a materialist. I had overeaten and my best friend said, ‘No problem. Put a finger down your throat, that’s what I do.’ The first time was the hardest (like the first murder), but when the sky didn’t fall it was positively enlightening: ‘Look Ma, no consequences!’ Just a big deafening silence from the universe.”

The column mused about “The Clinton thing,” and whether the president’s dalliance with a White House intern would successfully make itself go away by the perpetrator’s application of a few carefully crafted words. The results of that experiment are history: Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice but has remained wildly popular with the masses for many years.

Two Oval Office occupants later we are supposed to believe what we hear about healthcare (“You can keep your doctor”) and about the causes of the Benghazi attacks (Susan Rice’s rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows spinning a false video narrative), but these too have been met with deafening silence and inaction.

Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) coined a phrase to describe what is happening in our culture that allows evil to abound that otherwise would have been punished in past times: “defining deviancy down.”

The long-term fallout of the latest public whopper—news anchor Brian Williams’ original lie, and subsequent lies in apologizing for the original lie—remains to be seen. But because the laws of God are as immovable as Gibraltar and as reliable as the setting of the sun, there will be some. We are in denial to think sin has no consequences.

For openers, whether lies are punished or gotten away with it, our soul takes a hit. I am not even talking about eternal consequences here but about the incremental and intangible whittling away of the soul. On a societal scale, the fabric of culture becomes so honeycombed with falsehood that all its members are diminished unawares. Our expectations of one another, of our public officials, of our media, are subtly lowered, with the resulting collective malaise, distrust, and melancholy.

In the movie Quiz Show (1994), a reporter closing in on a man embroiled in a mushrooming fabrication, tells him this story:

Reporter: “I remember five or six years ago my Uncle Harold told my aunt about this affair he had. It was a sort of mildly upsetting event in my family.”

Man: “Mildly?”

Reporter: “Well you see you have to put it in context. The thing of it is, the affair was over for something like eight years. So I remember asking him, you know, ‘Why did you tell her? You got away with it.’ And I’ll never forget what he said. It was the getting away with it part he couldn’t live with.”

In 2015, I shall consider that as a society we have not yet gone under for the third time if there is still potential in our lies to keeps us up at night.