Who Can You Trust?

Finding truth in big piles of lies

Promo card for Johnny Carson’s Fifties-era game show

Editor’s Note:  Have a question concerning the whereabouts of your lost credit card? Quit racially profiling Matt, he didn’t take it. Though if you find it, he’ll happily take it when you become a paid subscriber to America’s not-so-newsy News Leader. Any other questions? Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com

Dear Matt,
I'm struggling with deciphering between what is real and fiction — with everything. Are those social media scenic Reels that capture my attention generated by AI? Are all the theories conspiratorial? They say ask Snopes, but some suspect they're just run by the liberal media. Where do I find truth? What is the truth?
Kenta J.

Good God, woman. I was hoping to get off easy this week  — the hickory shad are running, and I’d much rather be working out my fly rod than my Dell keyboard. What is it with the heavy questions like What is truth? This is Ask Matt, not Ask Descartes.

But…..my false humility aside, you’ve come to the right place. And I will now give you two reasons why:

A.      Your average media encounter these days is chock-full of manufactured outrage, cherry-picked “facts,” and smirky demagoguery. And that’s just a single episode of Jesse Watters Primetime. Slack Tide and its proprietor (hint: me) might be the only ones you can trust.

B.      Never trust anyone who tells you they are the only one you can trust. (That last graf was just a decoy.) For none of us have a monopoly on truth. And even if we believe we are wholly dedicated to telling it, as I try to do in each and every outing here, we could be wrong.  Even the most well-intentioned human beings are often wrong. Admitting both your human fallibility and endless capacity for wrongness provides the very best chance you have of cracking whatever the truth is. Be open to assessing whatever resides within you that has the need to subscribe to falseness. So often, we’re all-too-enthusiastic about pointing out others’ lies. (I have made a living off of it.) But much less frequently do we admit when we’re lying to ourselves. A much harder truth to swallow.

It feels, from your question, that you want me to pick winners and losers. But I’m not going to do that. Not because I’m a nice guy. (I’m not that nice.) But because there’s too many losers, and not enough winners. So much of what passes for  “The Conversation” these days  (a term that makes me laugh, since most dialogues are actually monologues — one guy waiting for the other guy to stop talking), is hampered by people hellbent on destroying their ideological enemies, instead of  honestly tussling with them. Or maybe learning something from them – even if they’re unrepentant liars —which can help recalibrate your own truth radar.

I’ve always liked having friends on both sides of the aisle, even if I tend to find disagreement with them for one reason or another. In the past, I have come to resent selected liberal friends for their adherence to mind-numbing language policing/pronoun inventions, gender confusion, lackadaisical attitudes toward open borders, and their childlike faith that the government knows how to spend my money better than I do. Though at present, I mostly resent my conservative friends for hypocrisy, cultic tendencies (in the service of Orange Julius Caesar), and an unwillingness to engage with any information or opinion that doesn’t originate from their conspiratorial fever swamp. Not to mention, 50-year-old guys in khakis and golf shirts that I used to think were on my side have come to display the same anarchic nihilism that I used to despise in Antifa dorks with their face diapers and black cat-burglar pajamas. I don’t see much difference between the two anymore, except that the former has a more diversified investment portfolio and better hygiene, even if they don’t smell any better, since their souls are rotting within.

Neither do I put stock in being an “independent” just for independence’s sake, as so many independents are really just partisans with commitment issues. Just because they haven’t plighted their troth to one side or another doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of doing something truly harebrained, like supporting RJK Jr., which even his own family is unwilling to do.

But nobody’s perfect, even if we like to think we are. And sometimes, it pays to listen to disinformation, or exaggerated information if it’s not outright false. Because when people take the time to try to shock and awe you, they’re giving you the most intimate snapshot of themselves:  they’re telling you their fears.

I’m a triangulator by nature, so I watch all three major cable networks regularly. And I will tell you what I’ve learned:  Your average Fox anchor is afraid  — or as afraid as you can feign when you’re pulling down seven or eight figures a year — that our country has been overrun by un-American nihilists who’d rather let the place burn than see it be under the control of the other side. Your average MSNBC anchor is afraid that our country has been overrun by un-American nihilists who’d rather let the place burn than see it be under the control of the other side.

And they say finding commonality is dead.

Your average CNN anchor, for whatever it’s worth, was afraid that the Gayle King/Charles Barkley show would go on for even one more week, though mercifully, it’s been put out of its misery. But that’s neither here nor there………

In this presidential election year, with a former president facing down four criminal trials and his own narcissism disorder, and a current president facing worldwide strife and his own senescence, everything feels out-of-whack right now. Like anything could happen, and probably something very bad will. So fear-mongers are enjoying full employment at the moment. And they don’t even much have to manufacture it, since very real fears  — from will our republic survive this election, to will one of these unwinnable foreign entanglements trip off WW III, to how will we stop getting bled out at the grocery store and gas station — are thick on the ground.

How do you assess who is telling the truth? Well, my strong advice is to not cut yourself off by only listening to one source. Don’t just keep silo-wanking. But try to take it all in, across the board. Even if it’s just to hate-watch, know what you’re hating, and why you should. Because even people who are wrong 90 percent of the time, are, by definition, right 10 percent of the time. Get to know their 10 percent.

Personal cards on the table:  I was a lifelong conservative, never overly committed to any side (a moderate, I suppose you’d call me). But I went to war with many fellow conservatives when Trump took over “my side,” and many of my old compadres suspended the kind of skepticism of themselves that they regularly apply to the other side when they became the ones both justifying and championing atrocities that they would readily condemn if committed by outsiders.

But as angry as it has made me  — and I do strongly believe in the salutary benefits of righteous anger — I also recognize that so much of what causes my old friends to lie, cheat, and start-the-steal is fear. Which is not an excuse. Just a motivation explanation.  When you think you might lose everything, you might be willing to do anything. And they’ve tried. How else do you explain Marjorie Taylor Greene still being in Congress?

To me, one of the most pleasing verses in the Bible is Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, let us reason together.”  It sounds like men and women at work. Conducting the very hard business of overcoming their fear of each other, and letting the dust settle. This has been done before, and it can be done again. Even if it feels like it can’t at the moment.  

And so as much as I enjoy my righteous anger, and laying hammershots on former friends I now regard as enemies who have betrayed everything I hold dear (anger is dangerous, but what most don’t admit is that it’s also fun – it heightens your aliveness), I try, on my best days, to not see them through my angry eyes, but to see them how God does. As fellow fallen men and women. Who, on some days, make the right calls. And on some days, make the wrong ones. Just like me. And who, even on their worst days, are as afraid as I am of losing their country, even if we think we are losing our country for different reasons, and perhaps even to each other.

The best way to take a measure of a man isn’t through his boasts, but through his fears. Because fear equals vulnerability. And if you understand a man’s fears, you understand what motivates him. Which might not just release him, it might release you from hating him. For so much of what we fear is what we fail to understand. And then we let those fears define us.

As I have said often in print, the only way to be better than the people you despise, is to actually be better. And if you really want to be better, you won’t let your life be defined by the people you despise. Because that’s how they are defining themselves. The person they despise, being you. Make it harder for them to despise you by showing them a better way. If for no purer reason, out of righteous spite, the ultimate revenge.

And that is how you should read the news. All the news. With qualified love, and selective outrage. For the news doesn’t drive us as much as we give it credit for. But it is a reflection of us. The algorithm knows what you want to read — what you have clicked on in the past — and so it serves it up to you again and again, piping hot. The “truth” you seek in the news isn’t just a reflection of what’s happening, but of what you want to happen, thus delivering you more of that kind of news.  So be vigilant in what you wish for. This is why I have started to click on a lot more Dodo dog videos.  You can’t be too careful.

Bonus Tracks: I’m reading another charming new book right now by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy (he’s written two others), called World Within a Song. As the title suggests, it contains short chapters on the songs that have formed Tweedy.  And when I came across his dispatch on the old-timey Appalachian banjoist Frank Proffitt’s  “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” (a song Tweedy’s recorded with his old band, Uncle Tupelo), it doesn’t dovetail perfectly with what I wrote above. But it’s in the same family, even if Tweedy is an admitted unbeliever. So I’m including a healthy chunk right here (minus his paragraph breaks):

The premise is, you got it, Satan’s kingdom must, you know, come down. How we go about making that happen changes as the song progresses. First, we’re going to pray. If that doesn’t work (spoiler: it won’t), we’ll sing. Still no luck? Then we’re going to have to shout. ‘Shout until they tear your kingdom down.’  So, the question is, why would this nonbeliever (me, not Frank. Frank is a believer without a doubt) find this song so utterly compelling and cathartic? So much so that I want to sing it to myself. Why did I believe I could sing this song convincingly?  I think it was something about how old it all felt. How clearly it made the struggle to deal with all the bullshit an eternal ordeal. This song and the performance helped me form a connection to the angst of the past. It’s silly sounding, perhaps, but god, did it feel good to know that the crappy way I felt wasn’t new. Granted, this isn’t what most people would ever get out of this song. Surely I was projecting at IMAX proportions. But I still feel it. And I stand by my interpretation’s validity. Because what I was really searching for in those days was authenticity. I craved it. There was a deep need to feel like I wasn’t always being lied to. That there were, in fact, ‘real’ things in the world. Not everything was an agreed-upon fiction like the flag, or dollar bills, or ‘sports teams.’ ……. Punk rock records gave me a lot of hope, but they weren’t foolproof.  Bands could burn you by ‘selling out.’ Which is kind of a quaint concept these days. It was dumb. But it really did hurt at the time.  So recordings like this – where one isn’t even sure the person singing understands that they’re being recorded, and, let’s face it, by now they’re almost certainly dead – became the gold standard for authenticity in our world. This song was unassailably pure. The fact that this song refers to Satan, one of the top three hallucinations of all time, made not one bit of difference. What I heard then, and what I still hear today, is what I always thought was written in the margins of punk music. The defiant dream that for good to triumph over every fucking thing in the world that sucks, all of the evil, all of the greed, all of the phoniness, all of it, everything you hate – all you have to do is keep singing. Don’t stop. Shout if you have to. Whatever you think ‘Satan’s kingdom’ might be, however strong a hold you might think the ‘devils’ have on the world, it’s no match for a teenager in their bedroom listening to a broken voice and a rattling banjo echoing some truth through the trees.

While we’re on Tweedy, here’s a song with an infectious little groove that he recorded with the legendary Mavis Staples, “I Like The Things About Me,” off her 2013 album One True Vine (which he produced).