Find Your Shoes

We were waiting in the car not wanting to be the first people at the election watch party when I got her message “I’m 176 down with six wards to go.”

The basement of the bar was lit with dozens of candles. It looked cozy and warm but the mood was already desolate and the candidate herself hadn’t yet appeared. Her canvassing manager was holding his cellphone and peering into his laptop, his Green Bay stocking cap on the table and his hair thick and standing on end as if to register his great shock at the imminent failure. He was touchy and very male-like, tolerating no comment without arguing. Any conversation was taken as criticism. I folded my hands to wait for my friend.

There is a science to campaigning, a science to everything. But it was clear the science had let him down. He seemed angry and sad – but not for her. For the failure of science. Her campaign, motoring along like a normal campaign, one of four she had managed over the years for the same elective office, suddenly encountered a tsunami of money from an Independent Expenditure Committee (IEC) supporting her opponent. It came in such massive, unimaginable waves that there was nothing to do but try to grab a tree branch to keep from drowning. So it was that a 14-year incumbent with a record of accomplishment and advocacy lost her seat.

Defeat had felt inevitable for days, mini-strokes hinting at the big, last one. So I wasn’t surprised, maybe because I didn’t know the science. What I quickly learned, though, was that lies are powerful and that lies repeated often enough, especially in glossy color brochures delivered in people’s mailboxes week after week, will take hold as the truth. As Mark Twain is thought to have said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” The IEC specialized in lies and they were good at it. Their lies circled the world before my friend even found her shoes. It was awful to watch.

As often happens when people have been pampered with the truth too long, they freeze in disbelief when the first lie comes at them. It’s an anomaly, they think. A once in a lifetime thing. And then the next lie comes and another and pretty soon, the cashier at the grocery store is repeating the lies to everyone in the checkout line and those people go home and talk about the lies over dinner and everyone at dinner carries the lies in their lunchboxes to work the next day where the lies gets told as truth to dozens more people. And then the lies becomes truth.

People who are basically truthful and honest themselves, those who would never think of lying about someone except in a nice way, “Oh, she looked wonderful” when she looked a fright, those folks don’t know how to play lie ball. They try to correct the lie instead of lobbing a worse lie over the net at the liar. But there is no correcting; the lie already exists in people’s heads as truth.

I ran into people who should have known better who would talk about hearing bad things about my friend and I would set about correcting them but it was always a weak and unpleasant dialogue. I’d be incredulous that they even entertained the lies much less believed them and they’d be impatient listening to what seemed like excuses. Well, they seem to be thinking, why would someone say those things if they weren’t true? That’s when I realized that liars are counting on the rest of us to be truthful and honest, to not lie ourselves or be around people who lie. That’s why we believe lies. Because we are naive to dishonesty.

We good guys are sitting ducks out here.

It’s depressing. But I feel a lot smarter for knowing this.

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Photo by Andrew Tanglao on Unsplash