We Americans are so often suckers for clever connivers, especially when they speak with utter authority. Simple solutions to complex problems are much more attractive than a struggle to identify and accept truth. Reality is usually, you know, a bit messy.
Yes, we’re talking about contemporary politics here, but we have quite a history of gullibility.
Take, for instance, the example of George Hull, a New York cigar-maker in the years just after the Civil War. Hull was an atheist, and he was offended by a revivalist preacher’s insistence on the literal truth of the passage in Genesis that declares, “There were giants in the Earth in those days.” Hull figured he might as well get rich off such nonsense, so he hired a stone carver in Chicago to create a 10-foot giant out of a hunk of Iowa gypsum. Then he had the statue secretly buried on a farm south of Syracuse, near the hamlet of Cardiff. When well-drillers uncovered the hulk a year later, it was declared both a miracle and proof of the inerrancy of scripture. Believers flocked to Cardiff from all over the country, paying 50 cents for a 15-minute viewing. Then Hull cashed out, and sold his interest in the statue for about $500,000 in today’s money. You can still see the so-called Cardiff Giant today at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown.
While we may shake our heads at those 19th-century rubes who saw their unlikely beliefs confirmed by a hunk of rock, it’s not so different from 21st-century marks – people who allow themselves to be deluded by shameless politicians and cable TV demagogues.
We’re witnessing some Cardiff Giant moments in America now, but the swindlers have swapped out their chisels for teleprompters and campaign rallies.
Like those Fox News hosts who cherry-picked some benign moments from 41,000 hours of video shot on Jan. 6, 2021, and claimed the people who attacked the Capitol were “sightseers.” Or like Ron DeSantis, the latest Florida man to run for president, who falsely claims New York and California allow what he called “post-birth” abortions. Or like Donald Trump, who claims that felonies in Manhattan are at a “record level” – when, in fact, the rate is about one-fifth what it was in 1990.
Yet it would be a mistake for us to see Trump and DeSantis and the personalities of Fox News as the major impediments to truth in America. They’re liars, yes, but they are byproducts, not the creators, of Americans’ craving for simplistic answers. They draw power from our unwillingness to recognize what’s true about both our past and today’s reality.
We see this starkly in the push to make our schools teach a sanitized version of American history, and to stop classroom discussion that doesn’t reflect traditional heterosexuality and white sensibility.
In suburban Long Island and in south-central Pennsylvania, for example, students were stopped from reading Front Desk, a middle-grade novel about the experience of a Chinese immigrant family – which was a national bestseller that won the 2018 Parents’ Choice Gold Medal for Fiction. That sort of thing has happened over and over again. During the last school year, according to PEN America, about 40 percent of the books banned from schools featured either LGBTQ themes or key characters who are people of color.
What’s bothering us, apparently, is reality — the reality that everybody in America isn’t straight and white, and that our history isn’t peopled with only heroes. Yet editing our history, or distorting it, won’t change it. Teaching our children that racism ended when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation is no more justifiable than teaching that giants once roamed the earth.
In fact, truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality. Children taught a polished version of our past, and discouraged from probing for uncomfortable truths, will surely be unable as adults to distinguish fact from fiction, and more susceptible to the next conspiracy theory to come along.
In that regard, it is worth noting that the Genesis account of giants upon the earth is immediately followed by the familiar story of the flood, which spared only Noah and his family, along with their ark co-passengers, two of every creature on earth. There have been plenty of stories of explorers finding pieces of Noah’s Ark, of course, and they’re no more credible than the tale of George Hull’s giant in central New York. Still, the devout may note the reason Genesis offers for the flood: “The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on earth,” the Biblical account says, “and his heart was deeply troubled.”
You can understand why, can’t you?
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.