If Only Wishing Made It So
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
After Weak Jobs Report, Trump Says He’s Firing Agency’s Commissioner
The New York Times
Denial, as we know all too well, is not just a river. The origin of that observation is unknown, but it’s become popular to say and, unfortunately, all too popular to practice.
In fact, we are living through a period of denial with an administration that seems to believe that if information is withheld, or not gathered at all, a different, more commodious reality will be created. Maybe that’s what Kellyanne Conway had in mind, while serving as the 45th President’s adviser, when she said that his press secretary was presenting “alternative facts.”
Many of us, however, like to believe that objective reality exists. We could get philosophical, along with Pirandello (“Right You Are, If You Think You Are”), or with quantum physics which posits that more than one objective reality exists. But let’s not go there. Let’s live in a world of, scientific facts based on observable, provable evidence.
That’s not what’s going on at the moment here in our country. Measles, for example, cannot be cured by taking cod liver oil, despite what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may say. Mexico was never going to pay for the “beautiful” border wall that Donald Trump paid for with diverted defense funds for educating children of military members.
It gets worse. The leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency has announced its intention to revoke the 2009 declaration, known as “the endangerment finding,” that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. That announcement came weeks after EPA’s announcement that it was going to dismantle its scientific research arm. What we don’t know, presumably, can’t hurt us. Maybe if we ignore the issue, the Earth will cool off.
All the while, the administration is discouraging the growth of renewable energy sources, while simultaneously encouraging production and use of fossil fuels, including coal, oil of course, and gas. Global warming? Climate change? As Alfred E. Neuman says, “What, me worry?”
And, most recently Donald Trump—predictably—on August 1 said he was firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, asserting “without evidence that she had manipulated monthly jobs figures,” The New York Times reported. Trump was angry because the BLS revised down by 258,000 jobs earlier reports about new jobs creation in the economy. “’In my opinion,’” The Washington Post reported Trump saying, “’today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.’” (Emphasis and capitalization as written). The government, it turns out, is there to serve Trump, not the country.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a reputation for being scrupulously non-political, isolated and insulated from political pressure, and exceptionally careful about the data it reports. Revisions are made to previous monthly reports, as happened in the August 1 report, as more information comes in.
Killing the messenger bearing bad news isn’t new, but bumping off the courier doesn’t change the facts. The issue here is one of living with an uncomfortable reality. The world, and life, we know all too well, are often not what we want them to be. But the beginning of wisdom, and success, is embracing that reality and working with it. A weather forecaster can ignore gathering clouds to predict sunshine, but that won’t prevent a thunderstorm.
One of the likely results of Trump’s firing the BLS commissioner is that business leaders will become skeptical of data reports that they rely on to make financial decisions. Similarly, political pressure on the Federal Reserve Bank to lower interest rates, which is to say attempting to politicize the Fed, may also lower confidence in an economically essential institution.
What we are getting, is the equivalent of good weather forecasts from an administration that insists on painting a gloomy picture of a past that wasn’t so bad and then declaring that we’re recovering and on the road to a golden age because we’re being led by a Great Leader. This is the stuff of autocratic regimes which thrive on illusion and fantasy.
In David Remnick’s analytical piece in the current New Yorker, he quotes the observation of an Israeli writer, Ergat Keret, about the 45th and 47th President: “’The genius of Trump is that he has internalized social media and how it works. He knows that saying something is no different than doing something, that it’s just one damn thing after another and nothing matters. Trump realized you don’t have to do things. You just need to say things and then it’s all wrapped in one big burrito of dream and fantasy.’”
So just saying it makes it so. Mexico will pay for the wall. Tariffs will make America rich, and Americans won’t have to pay them. Covid will just disappear. Etcetera.
This behavior explains in large part Trump’s preternatural hostility to the media (“enemy of the people,”) (“scum of the earth”) because their reporting often conflicts with the word picture that Trump presents of what he wants us to believe.
The problem for us is that when Trump is gone, the wreckage that he has left behind will remain.
