sonora2sonoma

A person’s perspective in life is built upon a foundation of interests; meaning is derived based on how those interests are affected by what transpires. How one interprets the events that transpire during the course of one’s days determines one’s actions—how one responds to the circumstances with which one is confronted: A generous outlook will elicit a generous response, while a selfish one will result in selfish actions. A person’s actions will reveal their true intentions to anyone paying attention. Outward acts mirror inward inclinations—garbage in, garbage out, and so forth.

A persons words, while they may be revelatory of the quality of their inner workings—the purity of their intentions—may also, if their intentions are impure and their motives less than honorable, be false and misleading, designed to deceive others in line with whatever purpose motivates their mendacity.

When someone’s words correspond with their actions, we perceive them as being truthful; when those actions are in disharmony with their utterances, we conclude, if we are conscious of the discrepancy, that they are being dishonest.

When a person’s words repeatedly fail to correspond with their actions, yet they forcefully maintain their insistence that they are speaking truthfully, the normal response of those in observance is to conclude that person has lost all credibility. Parables such as the one about the little boy who cried wolf were designed to illustrate this phenomenon.

The unabashed deceitfulness of the current president of the United States would seem to fly in the face of this logic. This man’s practice of repeating his lies ad infinitum despite documented evidence of the falsehood of his assertions, rather than eliciting doubt and incredulity among his followers, fortifies their belief in the purity of his intent and cements their adherence to his cause.

It would seem the president believes that, by repeating his lies often enough and persisting in doing so over time, they eventually assume an aura of truth by virtue of their constant and repeated recitation. But, while the constant repetition of a mantra is said to lead the devotee to higher realms of understanding, the president’s incessant uttering of falsehoods instead leads the listener/follower to deeper depths of deception. Which is precisely his intention.

The ability to turn logic on its head and twist facts in support of nefarious ends is not limited to the president alone; the vice president did so as recently as the other day when he sought to rationalize the politicization of the Corona epidemic by the president’s witless son, among other, by citing one similarly inappropriate remark made by an opponent in an editorial as justification for their outrageously inappropriate responses. An eye for an eye renders everyone blind, as they say, yet, after millennia of eye-plucking, the wisdom of that message remains beyond the ken of far too many people.

Future volumes will be written about the trump phenomena; parallels will be drawn between his and Adolf Hitler’s rise and eventual fall. Will those who follow us be any more successful than we’ve been so far in applying the lessons history has to offer? Minus some great, world-wide awakening of consciousness, given what is known about human nature, the odds aren’t all that promising.

Yet, we must hope, for minus hope, the answer will most assuredly be “Nope.”

Tim Konrad