Over-use lessens the impact of any word. Even our most cherished f-bombs and terms of sacrilege can, with over-use, cease to shock. As with cliched metaphors, we cease to hear, to see.
I fear we may have reached that point with a term we keep hearing in the current political discourse.
The word I am concerned we are losing presently is the word “lie” and all of its forms, liar, lying, lied. Over the last four years of the current administration, we’ve heard again and again that the president, in any given speech, will tell between ten and twenty lies. Sometimes, networks like CNN follow the talk with a “fact-check,” as a way of coming at the problem from another angle. Sometimes the network reporting has taken to calling the president’s best whoppers “untruths,” but let’s face it. That isn’t an improvement.
Neither is the term “whopper.” It’s much too friendly for what is really a malicious intent. It sounds like someone talking after a fishing trip.
Over the past four years, the president has been accused of telling thousands of lies. I’ve lost count and can’t remember if he has passed the 15,000 or the 20,000 lie mark yet. But my concern here is with the way that this key word has ceased to carry moral weight, and I want to offer another as an alternative.
Journalists have been looking for new ways to convey this ongoing pattern while also not wanting to normalize it in any way. There is also one other problem with this because the infinitive “to lie” conveys one form of deception, the telling of that which is factually untrue. But another equally damaging kind of talk we hear often enough happens when the president says, for example, that the coronavirus could be gone soon, or it might not, but who can tell? Or “Some experts have said wearing a mask helps, but then Dr. Faucci said not to wear one early on.” This isn’t so much lying as it is playing both sides of the issue as though there really were two sides with equal merit, an appearance that can lead some to uncertainty and the fuzzy possibility that any opinion holds merit.
What I am arguing here is that the term we are using to describe the presidential discourse is over used, and while it may describe the final intent, it isn’t descriptive of everything. And it may be too childlike. Lying is what we accuse children of doing when they want to get out of something. We could argue that yes, this is what the president often does, but there’s more to it than that. I would like to propose a word more inclusive and helpful for what we are seeing. I offer the word “dissemble.” Dissembler and dissembling are also acceptable uses in any given context. Though it is longer, with more syllables than to say that Trump is lying, its very length may get us thinking.
I first found myself using this word in the ’90s when I was researching rhetoric on television talk shows. I found myself often describing many dissembling behaviors as ex-boyfriends or former neighbors would come on stage and try to completely restate the terms of the crime they were accused of. They would attempt to put incriminating events in new terms that would be benign and favorable for themselves.
They were, essentially, playing with appearances.
Again, Trump has been accused of lying and gaslighting, the latter a term I loved at first but have also see as having worn thin. A better term to add to the mix here is that he is dissembling. All of his rambling tangents during interviews and at his rallies, every one of his tweets, all of his public pronouncements–each has had the same effect of distorting, putting fuzz around, and ultimately remasking what is going on. It is strange to accuse the non-mask-wearer-in-chief of remasking, but that has been his effect.
The obvious case in point for this may be the way that Trump and right wing media have convinced so many of his followers that wearing a mask threatens their freedom, and is a greater threat to the American way of life than falling sick with COVID-19.
Focusing on wearing or not wearing masks because they are restrictive, while downplaying the threat of the virus by comparing it to the flu, has meant not holding Trump and his administration more responsible for its role in allowing the spread of the disease. It has had the effect of our not noticing that the spread of the virus is the real threat to our way of life and our freedom. But never mind. Focus on the mask and not that the spread has now undermined any hopes of a flattened curve and looms even larger than it did in March as a threat to the economy.
Denying one connection–between the pandemic and a failing economy–Trump has seemed to focus attention on an ideological connection–between wearing a mask and freedom. This may be seen as dissembling. As the ideological connection continues to undermine attempts at containment of the virus–Trump still is saying that it will disappear soon, or there will be a vaccination sooner than we think–this points to deepening unemployment, a deepening crisis and threat to our real freedoms.
I fear “dissembling” is still too neutral a word for the actions of the “venomous charlatan” destroying our democracy.
I fear you are right, David. This was the one struggle I had with this. Perhaps I should have moved toward “venomous charlatan.” I was hoping that the roll of three syllabus would carry the weight of accusation.