It's A Lie, But You Know What He Meant

So the old Shrub mouthpiece, Ari Fleischer, was on the news today.   Someone imagined he might have something relevant or insightful to add to the discussion.

That person should be hunted down and beaten immediately.

But the ‘host’ of the newscast asked some questions.  How are we who value words to take the obviously false things Trump said during the campaign?  One of the issues mentioned was when tRump said he saw thousands of people – Muslims, I presume – dancing on top of buildings in Jersey after the towers came down.  Ari agreed that this was probably false, but that people – the press included – knew the underlying message that tRump was transmitting.  That the actual words may have been inaccurate – some would call it a lie - but the message was still valid.

What.  The.  Actual.  Fuck. 

There either were or were not thousands of Muslims dancing on rooftops in Jersey, happy that the US had been brought to its knees.  Since absolutely no one else can corroborate this xenophobic fantasy, I’m going to go with my gut here and gently drop the bullshit flag.  See how it flutters?

But listen, okay, maybe we adults can figure out this crap in context.  Somewhere on earth, certain Muslims were happy about what happened on 9-11.   A tiny number.  Probably hiding out in caves in Afghanistan, dancing around a fire and waving their Kalashnikovs and planning to bugger a little boy after the others go to their own caves to bugger their own 12 year old boys.  Evay-body PAR-TAY.   But the business about the rooftop cavorting as the towers fell?  No, that was a lie.  So many of the words spouted by the Orange Overlord were lies.  Big ones.  Whoppers.  But we were supposed to parse the words and divine the meaning of statements like, “If Hillary Clinton is elected, it will be the end of our country” or “Barack Obama is the most ignorant president in history.”   Personally, I don’t see a lot of wiggle room there.  I think I know what he meant.  Because he said what he meant.

You know who hears the words and believes them, though?   Little kids.  Little kids believe the words we say.   We’re adults and we’re supposed to tell them all the right things, to answer their questions as best we can.   They have almost no filters.  Tell them there’s a fat man in a red suit who travels all over the world on a fucking sleigh pulled by reindeer, guess what?  They believe it.  They don’t parse all the myths about Santa or Jesus or the goddamned Tooth Fairy.  They believe the words that we tell them.  Parents or not, I bet most of us think first when a kid asks us a question because we instinctively know, I guess, that they’re looking to us for guidance. 

An adult who wishes to become president should know better than to lie.  And definitely know better than to lie with an agenda in mind, an agenda that includes personal gain.  Kids believe us.  We run the world.  We can do shit they can’t, like drive and buy airline tickets online.  We run for president and make big decisions about how we deal with other countries.  They expect and they deserve the truth, as nearly as we understand it.

A third grader woke up yesterday and asked who had won the election.  Her parents told her the truth – Donald Trump won.   She considered this for a while and then asked, “Will Sayed be at school today or did he already have to leave?”   Sayed is one of her classmates.  All over the United States, and even in my own little cushy neighbourhood, kids have internalized the message from Donald Trump.  Mexicans are rapists and murderers.  Muslim people are terrorists.  Round those motherfuckers up and send them back to – where?  Most of them were born here, of course, and are as American as you or me.  As American as Timmy and Lassie.   I bet many of them can whistle the Andy Griffith theme.  Americans.

 I assured my own children that Trump was not going to win.  How could America elect such an ass?  It hardly seemed possible just a few days ago.  Any ideas about how smart I am should die here.  My six year old – he was five when the campaigns began – told me without any prompting at all that we should not vote for Trump.  I asked him why not.  He said, “He’s mean.  He calls people LOSERS.”   This is just about as honest as it gets, isn’t it?  Don’t elect people who are name-callers.  Anyway, last week, they held a mock election in his first grade class, and he was mortified that one – only one – of his classmates preferred Trump.  “I guess”, he said, “he just wants to burn the world down.”  You might think he picked this up from me, but you’d be wrong.  He came to his own conclusions.  My teenager, well, that’s another story because he wants to talk about it, and I give him what I think.  So let’s not count him.

But the point remains:  kids want the truth even more than we adults do, and I don’t know about you, but I value it pretty highly.  For the last eight years, my kids have figured Obama to be a pretty decent man, and I trusted him enough to let my children listen to him if they wanted to.  I’m pretty sure I won’t let them listen to tRump unless it is to remind them that some adults will lie through their teeth.  So it goes.