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On the day that Oxford Dictionaries announced Post-Truth as the "word of the year" London Walks Pen & Daily Constitutional Special Correspondent David Tucker writes…
Post-truth.*
So that’s the Word of
the Year says the Oxford English
Dictionary.
Wonder if they’re telling the truth?
But seriously, what a sleazy, despicable, vile, shameless
word.
No, let’s rephrase that: what a sleazy, despicable, vile,
shameless, dishonest state of affairs
that word describes.
That we’ve now got a word for it tells you how far the
cancer’s advanced. (Puts me in
mind of the impossibly brave Christopher Hitchens saying “I’ve got stage 4 esophageal
cancer; there is no stage 5.”)
I mean let’s postmortem this linguistic “development.” Let
it sink in. Let’s run the changes.
There are hundreds of “post” words and none of them are even
remotely as odious as post-truth. Postwar, postdoctoral, postgrad, postindustrial,
postmodern, postproduction, postseason, posttraumatic, postdated…
Well, you get the idea. And now, crashing the party, we’ve
got shamefaced – or should I say shameless – “post-truth.”
So it’s come to this.
Time for this boy to hunker down with some poetry. Always my response, it’s my staff, my
stay, my anchor.
Matthew Arnold’s Dover
Beach, for example.
Dover Beach
The sea is
calm tonight.
The tide is
full, the moon lies fair
Upon the
straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and
is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering
and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the
window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from
the long line of spray
Where the
sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you
hear the grating roar
Of pebbles
which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their
return, up the high strand,
Begin, and
cease, and then again begin,
With
tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal
note of sadness in.
Sophocles
long ago
Heard it on
the Ægean, and it brought
Into his
mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human
misery; we
Find also
in the sound a thought,
Hearing it
by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of
Faith
Was once,
too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like
the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I
only hear
Its
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating,
to the breath
Of the
night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked
shingles of the world.
Ah, love,
let us be true
To one another!
for the world, which seems
To lie
before us like a land of dreams,
So various,
so beautiful, so new,
Hath really
neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are
here as on a darkling plain
Swept with
confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where
ignorant armies clash by night.
Be sure to notice the first line
of the last stanza. Especially the word Arnold puts out there at the end of the
line.
No need to explain why Dover Beach came to mind when I picked
up the newspaper this morning and saw the Post-truth story.
The other** bit of verse that
comes to mind – comes to my aid and comfort in this clinging to the wreckage
moment –is Hotspur’s great line in Shakespeare’s I Henry IV.
It couldn’t be simpler, couldn’t
be cleaner, couldn’t be more a gauntlet flung down in the path of a
preposterous, faintly odious, lying scoundrel:
“Tell truth and shame the
devil.”
That line thrilled me half a century
ago when I was a callow undergraduate “English major” at the University of
Wisconsin
Time can not wither nor custom stale its appeal. It still thrills me.
So to hell with “post-truth.” Tell truth and shame the devil.
I suppose the “post-truth” story
tipped me over because I’ve been only too aware for some time now that this
sort of sharp practice isn’t confined to politicians. As a culture we’re awash
in lies.
And, yes, they’ve washed up
against our patch, our bailiwick.
Talking about rival concerns
helping themselves to our name. Free London Walks, for example. Or Authentic
London Walks.***
A couple of points spring to
mind. In the first instance, they’re not free and they’re not London Walks but
other than that everything’s tickety boo. I mean, “objective facts”, what do
they have to do with anything?
But the other point**** of
course is: if you’re doing something as intrinsically creative – which it has
to be if it’s done well – as a walking tour operation and you don’t have the
creativity – let alone the integrity – to think of your own name... what’s that
say about you and your “product”?
Well, I suppose it means you’re
post-truth.
*OED defines it thus: post-truth:
relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less
influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal
belief.
**Needless to say it’s not the only “other bit of verse that comes to
mind.” Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know” is there in this kit bag as well. Shining forth. And
shaming “post-truth.”
***And as for the other one, how
lame is that? They daring to say the oldest urban walking tour company in the
world – the walking tour company universally “acknowledged as the premier walking
tour company in the entire world” – isn’t authentic? And they are?
Talk about a hold your nose and
walk on by moment.
****A pretty good “other point”
that one. But it’s a molehill compared to the Everest of the bible,
establishing, right at the beginning – the opening verses of Genesis – the
fundamental importance of the “identity” of things. Doesn’t get any more basic
then Genesis Chapter 1.
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