‘You’re a liar.’ To say it face to face is so aggressive in itself it needs no volume, just a lot of back-up or a quick escape route.
That Donald Trump lost means ‘it’s easier to tell your kids character matters and telling the truth matters,’ CNN commentator Van Jones said through tears. It would be easier now for black parents like him, he said, to talk to their sons and not fear for their sisters from everyday racism emboldened by the president.
Private lies – ah now, is there any point getting into what those involve? There is no ducking the damage lies do inside families, only slightly softened by full confession. That party game ‘Truth’ surely only ever appealed to rash and callow youth, well before trying to set up their own households. (Which, for younger readers, was a common last century ambition.)
Trump was counted out on a splurge of wild untruth having told America what his supporters wanted to believe; that the pandemic was over, beaten, as he had triumphed over it full of steroids and expensive drug cocktails. Lies and more lies will be the strongest memories of the election. The blazing public ones always burst out of motor-mouths as on election night in the White House. The damage that they do lives on.
We know something here about public lies. There were decades during which Ian Paisley dominated unionism and a section of clerical Protestantism, while armed republicans dominated northern nationalism. Both lied as part of their everyday existence. The IRA’s victims were routinely explained away as part of ‘the British war machine’. Occasionally, when they killed the ‘wrong’ person or people with a bullet or bomb not meant for them, the organisation took back lies about ‘informing’. Some still linger and fester inside communities and families. Campaigns against security force atrocities and abuse keep going in parallel, aloft on bogus righteousness as well as genuine grief.
The Doc’s chief weapon was his tongue. Man of the cloth, vociferous about his closeness to his god, Paisley never apologised. He left this world without taking back an untruth made in the mould of others, the calumny delivered in Westminster with impunity and his customary pomp, against two south Armagh men he fingered for the Kingsmill atrocity. It was a lie that went around the world before the truth had got its boots on.
Like Trump, Paisley magnetised voters and holed less extreme competitors for the hardline vote by whatever occurred to him as he opened that merciless mouth. ‘Moderate’ unionism has never thought its way through their own ambivalence. Paisley became and remained an MEP thanks to a vote well beyond the DUP’s.
Ego begat heedless lying. British secret services were planning his assassination; that was a favourite routine in the pulpit. The enemy took many forms; the Scarlet Woman of Rome, atheistic communism, Catholic-dominated Europe. Cut it any way you liked, it meant his people were doomed, doomed. Only he told them the truth but the truth was terrible to hear. In truth, it was a terrible doctrine to preach. Those in his shadow developed without faith in their own judgment and with no regard for facts that did not suit.
No wonder Paisley’s late conversion to power-sharing, without preparation of the supporters still hooked on his doom-saying, took so many by surprise. To hear his son (and heir to North Antrim) gushing about Trump contains no surprise.
Truth can be painful. Lies hurt because the targets know the truth but have to struggle, breath knocked out of them, to make it heard. Joe Biden’s plagiarism was puny stuff. Trump’s last throws trumped his own record.
The lies that go unpunished do the damage, to the liar who increasingly lives in their own head as well as to the audience. Biden faces the pandemic and the live Trump legacy. Today’s leaderless DUP lives with that of Paisley.
