Truth is elusive in political talk

Amid the plethora of messages we encounter in our mediaculture—via the Internet, television, radio or other media—are those that spread lies. Often these lies are presented as facts; other times they are hoaxes meant to persuade readers of a particular political or other perspective.

We’re in the midst of a presidential campaign, and the claims and innuendos are abundant. And the true believers—those loyal supporters of each candidate—are convinced the person they support would never lie or misrepresent the truth.

When some nonpartisan fact-checking organization points out the falseness of a statement, it’s too late. People have moved on.

Cara Lombardo, in her article "Deconstructing the Rightwing Spin Machine" (The Progressive, February) offers an example. On Oct. 19 and 20, 2015, Sean Hannity told Fox News viewers that President Obama unilaterally decided that the United States was going to let in 250,000 refugees from Syria and other war-torn regions. Five days later, Donald Trump cited this figure in New Hampshire.

 

 

The claim, however, was completely false, Lombardo writes.

The fact-checking outlet PolitiFact traced the claim back to what appears to be a hoax article on a website called RealNewsRightNow. The article attributed the figure to a "Cathy Pieper" at the State Department. "We could find no Cathy Pieper working for the State Department," PolitiFact reported.

You can also check PolitiFact, which has won the Pulitzer Prize, for a list of 20 false statements by Hillary Clinton. Here are a few: "We now have more jobs in solar than we do in oil." "Every piece of legislation, just about, that I ever introduced (in the U.S. Senate) had a Republican co-sponsor." "We now have driven (health-care) costs down to the lowest they’ve been in 50 years."

False information can spread quickly. Following the Navy Yard shooting in 2013, writes Lombardo, "the far-right website Breitbart reported that guns are banned on military bases, suggesting that laxer laws may have saved lives." NRA member Ted Nugent repeated the claim on Twitter, and multiple Fox News contributors followed suit. The fact is that the rule does not ban all guns; one of the first Navy Yard victims was an armed security guard.

Politics has always drawn what Lombardo calls "strategic fibbing." For example, when Thomas Jefferson ran for president, a Connecticut newspaper cautioned that his victory would mean that "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced." A Jefferson supporter then said John Adams was a "repulsive pedant" who had sent his vice president overseas to bring back mistresses.

Lombardo quotes Lucas Graves, journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the forthcoming book Deciding What’s True: The Fact-Checking Movement in American Journalism: "Some politicians will continue to make a claim as long as they think it’s useful, no matter what the mainstream media or experts say."

Thus for years certain politicians have questioned the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth certificate, a matter that was settled, and then settled again.

The truth is usually complex and nuanced—partly true or true sometimes. But most people want simple answers or statements, and those who offer the nuanced truth are often not elected.

Usually corrections to false claims come after the claims have been disseminated. And, Graves says, "Even when presented with new information, people tend to stick to what they have heard."

The wonder and glory of the human

The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, $26, 292 pages)

 

 

Marilynne Robinson is that rare example of a writer who excels as a novelist and an essayist. And the qualities that make her fiction so good—the precise delineation of characters, beautiful language and intelligence—apply to her nonfiction as well.

Her fifth book of nonfiction is a collection of 17 essays originally delivered, sometimes in different form, as lectures. She favors one-word titles, a description that applies to all four of her novels and all but one of these essays.

The first essay, “Humanism,” lays out a theme that recurs throughout the book: the wonder and glory of the human. She presents this as a counterpoint to how we tend to treat one another. Although “the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” she writes, “we have as good grounds for exulting in human brilliance as any generation that has ever lived.”

And while she freely acknowledges humanity’s destructive tendencies, she places her humanism in the context of faith. “Our ontological worthiness,” she writes, is “in relationship with God.”

Robinson shows that she reads widely, as knowledgeable about science and history as she is about theology and literature. And she is unafraid to offer her critique of people’s faulty thinking in either area. She calls scientists’ insistence of the category “physical” absurd, an error of logic.

“I find the soul a valuable concept,” she writes, “a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.” Meanwhile, she argues, “neuroscience, at least in its dominant forms, greatly overreaches the implications of its evidence and is tendentious.”

She freely admits her own bias as a theist, which she recognizes goes against materialism, “a discipline of exclusive attention to the reality that can be tested by scientists.” While acknowledging the usefulness of this approach, she writes, “the greatest proof of its legitimacy is that it has found its way to its own limits.”

In another essay, “Givenness,” she makes a similar point: “Scientific reductionism, good in its place, is very often used to evade the great fact of complexity.”

In the same essay, she goes on to compare faith with disbelief: “Faith takes its authority from subjective experience, from an inward sense of the substance of meaning of experience. The same is true of disbelief, no doubt. Objective proof cannot be claimed on either side.”

In her emphasis on humanity’s dignity, Robinson often criticizes our current denigration of one another. She laments the rise of “cultural pessimism,” which she defines as “bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing.”

Robinson notes that “the writer most widely read in England while Shakespeare wrote was the French theologian John Calvin.” She is a huge fan of Calvin, whom she references in nearly every essay and quotes often. She does not mention his involvement in persecuting Anabaptists, however.

Calvin convinces her of the importance of human fallibility. Yet, Robinson writes, “I wouldn’t mind hearing the word ‘sin’ once in a while. If the word is spoken now it is likely to be in one of those lately bold and robust big churches who are obsessed with sins Jesus never mentioned at all. On the testimony of the prophets, social injustice is the great sin.”

She often criticizes a Christianity that is “rooted in an instinctive tribalism.” Christianity’s true nature, in contrast, “has no boundaries, no shibboleths, no genealogies or hereditary claimants.” This tribal Christianity is false and goes against the teachings of the Bible, she writes. “Does the word ‘stranger,’ the word ‘alien,’ ever have a negative connotation in Scripture? No. Are the poor ever the object of anything less than God’s loving solicitude? No.”

She also writes often about Shakespeare, noting that “[his] theological seriousness is simultaneous with his greatness as a dramatist.” In the essay “Grace” she concludes that Shakespeare “proposes that we participate in grace, in the largest sense of the word, as we experience love, in the largest sense of that word.”

At the opposite end of love is fear, the title of another essay. Robinson makes two points: “Contemporary America is full of fear,” and “fear is not a Christian habit of mind.” She does not mince words in her criticism of those who profess to be Christians: “Those who forget God, the single assurance of our safety, however that word may be defined, can be recognized in the fact that they make irrational responses to irrational fears.”

Robinson is free and unafraid in laying out her opinions, which many will not like. In “Proofs” she quotes Karl Barth, who said that “Christianity that excludes the Old Testament has a cancer at its heart.” In “Memory” she writes, “True and utter cowardice is defined by the act of carrying a concealed weapon.” And further: “If Christianity is thought of as a religion of personal salvation that allows one to sin now and repent at leisure, it is … almost limitlessly permissive. It virtually invites the flouting of Jesus’ teachings.”

In “Value,” she turns to economics and justice: “If bankers wrecked the economy, what sense does it make to drug-test the unemployed who need help surviving the wreck?”

In “Theology” she critiques rationalism: “The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think they can make themselves understood by shouting.”

In the same essay she goes on to describe how she comes to write a novel: “I find my way into it by finding a voice that can tell it, and then it unfolds within the constraints of its own nature, which seem arbitrary to me but are inviolable by me.”

Robinson addresses other subjects: economic inequality, the English Reformation, education, metaphysics, religion and more.

In “Realism,” the concluding essay in this volume, Robinson returns to the theme of human worth: “We know how profoundly we can impoverish ourselves by failing to find value in one another….A theology of grace is a higher realism, an ethics of truth. Writers know this.”

“The Givenness of Things” is a rich source of thought and provocation. Robinson’s interests are wide and her intelligence keen. Reading her is a rewarding experience.

The human face of evil

We are inundated by news of the atrocities of ISIS and other jihadist groups, and many Americans live in an often misguided fear of Muslims. We tend to view these Islamic militants as monsters.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s outstanding film Timbuktu paints a different portrait by showing the complex humanity of his characters.

 

 

This French-Mauritanian film, which originally came out in 2014 but only came to the United States this year, takes its name from the cosmopolitan city in Mali that draws people from many places and where many languages are spoken. It takes place during an occupation of the city by Islamists bearing a jihadist black flag.

The film opens with a group of jihadists chasing a small antelope across the desert in a land rover, shooting their guns to scare it into submission. This becomes one of many symbols for the reality many people find themselves in.

Soon, in the village, we witness people’s quiet resistance to these thugs, who use a loudspeaker to announce silly laws: Women must wear socks. No music is allowed. Most of the resistance comes from women. A woman selling fish in the marketplace refuses to wear gloves, pointing out how ridiculous such a rule is. “Go ahead, cut off my hands now,” she tells them. They back away.

Another woman, who has moved to Timbuktu from Haiti after she lost everything in 2010, walks boldly through the village without socks and laughs at the soldiers. They get out of her way.

The local imam explains to several jihadists that his own jihad (the word means “struggle”) is with himself, to better himself in service to Allah.

Three of the soldiers argue with each other about who is the best soccer player in the world, even though sports are not permitted. They take a soccer ball from a local boy. Later we see a group of boys playing soccer without a ball, illustrating the power of imagination. When the jihadists show up, they stop playing and pretend to do exercises.

The film feels comedic at this point, but soon we witness the stoning to death of a couple charged with adultery. This scene is based on an actual event, a 2012 public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok. Another woman receives 40 lashes for singing and 40 lashes for being in the same room as a man not of her family.

Another story line involves a family that lives in a tent outside the city. Kidane is a cattle herder who loves his 12-year-old daughter, Toya. He gets into a fight with a fisherman who killed one of Kidane’s cows for damaging his fishing net. Kidane accidentally shoots him. The Islamists arrest Kidane and, per sharia law, demand a blood money payment of 40 cattle to the fisherman’s family. Since he only has seven cattle, he is sentenced to death.

Sissako’s film is a poetic tribute to people living in a difficult situation. It is beautifully shot and shows the quiet faith of some of the people. It also portrays the jihadists as humans who are misguided and more interested in power than in religion.

Timbuktu is that rare film that is both disturbing and inspiring. While it depicts some characters’ resignation to fate, it also shows the power of free will in resisting the evil of oppression by the jihadists.

The film is rated PG-13 and is available on DVD.

The human face of evil

We are inundated by news of the atrocities of ISIS and other jihadist groups, and many Americans live in an often misguided fear of Muslims. We tend to view these Islamic militants as monsters.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s outstanding film Timbuktu paints a different portrait by showing the complex humanity of his characters.

 

 

This French-Mauritanian film, which originally came out in 2014 but only came to the United States this year, takes its name from the cosmopolitan city in Mali that draws people from many places and where many languages are spoken. It takes place during an occupation of the city by Islamists bearing a jihadist black flag.

The film opens with a group of jihadists chasing a small antelope across the desert in a land rover, shooting their guns to scare it into submission. This becomes one of many symbols for the reality many people find themselves in.

Soon, in the village, we witness people’s quiet resistance to these thugs, who use a loudspeaker to announce silly laws: Women must wear socks. No music is allowed. Most of the resistance comes from women. A woman selling fish in the marketplace refuses to wear gloves, pointing out how ridiculous such a rule is. “Go ahead, cut off my hands now,” she tells them. They back away.

Another woman, who has moved to Timbuktu from Haiti after she lost everything in 2010, walks boldly through the village without socks and laughs at the soldiers. They get out of her way.

The local imam explains to several jihadists that his own jihad (the word means “struggle”) is with himself, to better himself in service to Allah.

Three of the soldiers argue with each other about who is the best soccer player in the world, even though sports are not permitted. They take a soccer ball from a local boy. Later we see a group of boys playing soccer without a ball, illustrating the power of imagination. When the jihadists show up, they stop playing and pretend to do exercises.

The film feels comedic at this point, but soon we witness the stoning to death of a couple charged with adultery. This scene is based on an actual event, a 2012 public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok. Another woman receives 40 lashes for singing and 40 lashes for being in the same room as a man not of her family.

Another story line involves a family that lives in a tent outside the city. Kidane is a cattle herder who loves his 12-year-old daughter, Toya. He gets into a fight with a fisherman who killed one of Kidane’s cows for damaging his fishing net. Kidane accidentally shoots him. The Islamists arrest Kidane and, per sharia law, demand a blood money payment of 40 cattle to the fisherman’s family. Since he only has seven cattle, he is sentenced to death.

Sissako’s film is a poetic tribute to people living in a difficult situation. It is beautifully shot and shows the quiet faith of some of the people. It also portrays the jihadists as humans who are misguided and more interested in power than in religion.

Timbuktu is that rare film that is both disturbing and inspiring. While it depicts some characters’ resignation to fate, it also shows the power of free will in resisting the evil of oppression by the jihadists.

The film is rated PG-13 and is available on DVD.

Shining light on sexual abuse

Films generally rely on drama to attract the attention of viewers. And with viewers’ attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, a drama like Spotlight is a rarity.

The film tells the story of the investigation by a team at the Boston Globe newspaper, beginning in 2001, of cases of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese.

 

 

That investigation took many months of sustained, difficult work. And the film is faithful in showing the careful, persistent work that journalism requires, especially in uncovering a story of such magnitude.

Marty Baron, an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball”—arrives from Miami as the new editor of the Globe and assigns a team of journalists to investigate allegations against John Geoghan, an unfrocked priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys.

The paper’s “spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States, is led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson and includes reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer. They interview victims and try to unseal sensitive documents.

They run into many roadblocks. The cases brought against various priests were settled in mediation, and the information about those cases is sealed and unavailable.

The culture of Boston is infused with the sense that the Catholic Church is an important and necessary player in the city’s life. Robinson keeps hearing warnings to back off. The church does many good things; you don’t want to spoil that.

As part of their investigation, they interview some victims who are now adults. These are the most moving scenes in the film. While the abuse happened when they were young boys and they are now grown men, it’s clear their souls are broken. We get a glimpse of track marks on one man’s arm. Another man explains that he’s now sober but struggled for years with addiction.

A greater damage to these victims, however, is that the abuse helped destroy their faith in God. Even Rezendes, the reporter, who, like most of the others, grew up Catholic, says that while he hasn’t gone to church in years, he always thought he would return. Now, it’s clear, he won’t.

Pfeiffer, while going door to door, encounters the retired priest who had molested one of the men she had talked to earlier. He admits what he did, then adds, “but I never felt gratified myself,” as if that made it OK.

The film is especially good in its attention to detail. It gets so much right about journalism—how diligent reporters must be to obtain multiple sources, how they have to write everything down, how every piece of information is important.

In one scene, Rezendes is talking with a lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) about addenda to court documents. Garabedian says, “You don’t know the half of it.” Like a good reporter, Rezendes says, “Tell me the half of it.” And that leads to a key piece of evidence in breaking the story.

When they’ve turned in their initial story (they end up publishing over 600), Baron, the editor-in-chief, is copyediting the piece and says, “Too many adjectives.”

The film also shows that Robinson had a chance to break this story five years earlier but buried it and didn’t pursue the information he received.

Spotlight is an outstanding film that shows the power of the press in exposing the injustices of powers, like the Catholic Church, that try to hide their sins “for the greater good.”

Banks are no friends of the poor

I have a friend who lives below the poverty line. She and others I know do not use banking services. They can’t afford it. At her job, she receives her weekly pay in cash because she can’t cash a check. One time she lost her pay. This meant it was lost for good. She couldn’t go to her employer and say, “Cancel that check and write another.” It was gone.

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which works to help people get out of poverty. Every month, we hold a “big view” meeting to consider issues that affect people in poverty. We’ve looked at transportation, housing, health care and employment, among others. One evening, a man spoke about financial services and told people to keep in mind that banks are about making a profit.

 

 

You may say, Of course, they have to make a profit. However, as Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia School of Law argues in her book How the Other Half Banks, by denying financial services to the poor, banks have broken the social contract that justifies their public charter.

In his article “When the Bank Robs You” (In These Times, November), David Dayen points out that “the average unbanked family spends more on financial transactions than they do on food.”

The Ferguson Commission, convened by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to identify root causes that led to the social dislocation of racially segregated cities around St. Louis, named banking as one of those causes. “Without a bank or credit union account,” Dayen writes, “simple functions like converting government benefits into cash or converting that cash back into a check to pay bills or securing a small loan in emergencies become exorbitantly expensive.”

Dayen refers to Baradaran’s book, noting that modern banking wouldn’t exist without the state. “Customers freely deposit trillions in banks because of government-backed insurance, and the quasi-public Federal Reserve lends directly to banks at slim interest rates.”

Under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when deregulation ruled the day, “banks won the argument that they should be treated like any other industry, without a public responsibility,” Dayen writes.

With this profit motive in mind, and with the blessing of the government, banks abandoned poor areas because the poor don’t make profitable customers. “Between 2008 and 2013,” Dayen writes, “banks shuttered nearly 2,000 branches.” Of these, 93 percent were in postal codes with incomes below the national median.

Baradaran recounts the history of this kind of behavior. One 19th-century Chicago banker even said his firm levels “a prohibitory charge upon all accounts which average less than $300 for the express purpose of driving them away.”

Most attempts to bring the poor financial services have failed. Even credit unions are today more likely to serve upper- and middle-income customers, and community banks have been overwhelmed by mega-bank consolidation.

What to do? Baradaran notes that from 1911 to 1967, the post office offered savings accounts, attracting millions. She calls it “the most successful experiment in financial inclusion in the United States” and thinks we should restart it.

A USPS bank would not only reduce inequality, writes Dayen, “it would shore up the Postal Service’s finances and sustain post-office employment as a middle-class career.”

It would also eliminate predatory payday lenders and check-cashing operators, “interested only in skimming a hefty take for providing financial services the middle and upper classes take for granted.

The Bible denounces usury, lending money at exorbitant interest rates and preying on the poor. We need banks that provide public, not just profitable, service.

Caveat: the stores are out to get your money

 

In her article "Why You Bought That Ugly Sweater" in the December issue of The Atlantic, Eleanor Smith draws on a variety of studies to show some of the scientific tricks stores use to get you go buy their products.

Here are some of the ways she mentions:

1.       We perceive prices to be lower when they have fewer syllables and end with a 9.

2.       Stores overprice merchandise, then later mark it down. Smith says this is “a cognitive bias psychologists refer to as ‘anchoring.’ ”

3.       Stores know to give options, but not too many, since choice can be overwhelming to customers and discourage purchases.

4.       Believe it or not, snootiness can deliver a sale. Smith notes that one recent study found that “compared with friendly salespeople, rude clerks caused customers with low self-confidence to spend more and, in the short term, to feel more positively toward an ‘aspirational brand’ (that is, a brand that you covet but cannot afford).”

5.       Stores are wise to avoid communal dressing rooms because “when a customer who feels badly (sic) about her appearance tries something on and spots an attractive fellow shopper wearing the same item, she is less likely to buy it.”

6.       Stores jammed with merchandise may induce claustrophobia, while those that are too bare can cause agoraphobia. To counteract this, store often try to use the right scent.

7.       Cooler temperatures indoors may lead to a more emotional style of decision making, while warmth contributes to a more analytical approach. In addition, Smith writes, “Consumers prefer spending money in stores with cool, blue-toned interiors over stores with warmer, orange-toned interiors, where they tend to be less enthusiastic and balk at high prices.”

8.       Touch is important. “People are more likely to buy a high-quality item if they can handle it,” Smith writes.

9.       Music is also important. The right genre can cause customers to lose track of time. And one study found that “popular music leads to impulsive decisions, while lesser-known background music leads to focused shoppers—ones who are, say, more likely to carefully process information about promotions,” writes Smith.

OK, you’ve been warned. So get prepared and put on some lesser-known background music.