Wrote Steve Tesich in "A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992.
The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves. The dismantling of our Republic goes on, and if the spiritual and intellectual vigor of our children is the true indication of our future, then our future is even more troubling than our present....
We keep asking why the level of our children's intelligence and competence, as measured by all our tests, keeps dropping. The reason is very simple: We don't want them to be well educated. The last thing we want now is for an intellectually and spiritually vigorous generation to confront us with the question of what we have done to this country....
We have lost both faith and contact with our national myth.... When lost, the most dangerous thing one can do is to blunder blindly ahead. The comparison may be too extreme, but when Europe was lost in the Dark Ages it went back to its heritage for enlightenment and proceeded into the Renaissance. We have that option as well, and with it the hope and promise of our own renewal....
Tesich — who won an Oscar for writing the 1979 movie "Breaking Away" — was credited with coining the term "post-truth."
Here's a Nation article about the coinage — "Post-Truth and Its Consequences: What a 25-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About the Current Moment." That's from November 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries made "post-truth" the "Word of the Year."
You still have something of a grasp on truth if you can use the term "post-truth." You're probably observing that other people are living in the realm beyond truth, but you're still in touch with the truth, you must be thinking, perhaps dishonestly.
Obviously, November 2016 was the time for finally getting around to making "post-truth" the "Word of the Year." We know what happened in November 2016.
Tesich had died by then. He had a heart attack in 1996. Wikipedia says:
Steve Tesich was born as Stojan Tešić (pronounced TESH-ich) in Užice, in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on September 29, 1942. He immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister when he was 14 years old. His family settled in East Chicago, Indiana. His father died in 1962.
I was reading about Tesich not because I was researching "post-truth," but because I was reading about "Breaking Away."
That happened because after watching 2 seasons of "The White Lotus," I started watching another HBO series created by Mike White, "Enlightened." And I loved the scene in Season 1, Episode 9 where the Diane Ladd character has a conversation with another old woman in the grocery store. Who was that other actress? She seemed so familiar. It was Barbara Barrie, who, 3 decades earlier, had played the mother in "Breaking Away."
So I merely stumbled into the Steve Tesich essay and "post-truth."
Posts
51 comments:
The most post-Truth circa now emits from the left.
If the holier than thou LEFT hate you enough - they can manufacture any lie or half-truth about you - and the willing corrupt Party press(D) will deliver. Then tell you if you don't buy it wholesale, you're some kind of a "denier"
While coming across more true than not, this reads like a fortune teller's generic cautionary reading. Yep, politics is always a mess and the totalitarians always have dreams of domination. On the other hand, beware of stopped-clock prognosticators with one-note analyses that are correct twice a day.
The world post-smartphone is radically dumber and more independent and more dependent and more immature and more DIY and more...contradictory. But the truisms of fortune telling remain evergreen truisms.
It's fiction, not lies. High go-to entertainment value. There's a market for it.
If the left call you a white supremacist racist homophobic... that's just what your are.
It's all about the left's truth. Not reality.
Then antifa thugs can burn down you business and your town.... or your place of worship.
You will worship their truth, or else.
If you dare look into Biden family corruption - all facts will be ignored.
Breaking Away is a lovely movie. Enlightened is pretty good too. I guess I have to get around to White Lotus (after I catch up on Reservation Dogs, Andor, and Slow Horses...somewhat surprisingly, there continues to be more Great TV than I have time to watch).
I found Enlightened wonderfully enigmatic in that I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to think about the protagonist. I mean, I know what I thought about her, but the creator wasn't standing there shouting at me what I was supposed to make of all this. That was unusual for the 21st century.
The movie that put Mendelssohn on America's aural map.
Not Lies?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-left-serious-adverse-events-off-post-vaccination-surveys-despite-knowledge-of-possible-link-documents-show_4988809.html?
Well... Sorta.
4 decades earlier, alas
""A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992."
To their credit, The Nation didn't buy the post-truth Russia collusion hoax.
But I don't read it regularly enough to tell if they ever recognized that all governments are governments of lies, but leftist governments more so.
Tesich would be a great dinner companion if Andre was busy. He seems to have been born in Jan Hus territory. That was the first guy with the courage to stand up to the Papacy. And that really started the Reformation. As I recall his mistake was trusting the Pope’s offer of safe conduct to attend a meeting to discuss truth issues. He never left the meeting until his shriveled corpse finished burning at the stake. The Pope said Hus was peddling DISINFORMATION. So any promise made to a Heretic should not be honored.
Did you say, "I know my truth?"
I can revisit the Bloomington I lived in any time by watching Breaking Away. It was much grittier then. RCA was shutting down and it was harder to be a college town monoculture in the mid-70s. Outside our bubble, you could see that times were kind of tough. I lived on a bicycle and played Mendelssohn too. With the orchestra (there were five of them at IU).
Now, it's much nicer in B-town. Or maybe it just feels that way fifty years later because I have more money now and the music school doesn't have practice rooms stuck out in an old WW2 barracks building. Now if I could just find that DVD, said the old boomer.
Heh.
Breaking Away: a great movie with an indie movie feel. A lot of people can relate to townies vs. college or (a more popular movie genre) townies vs. summer people. Do the elite people have better manners as well as vocabulary? Do they walk taller and straighter like giraffes? Are they a different species?
I also like the comment that we are ripe for tyranny even if we are not yet embracing it. I join those who think the backlash against Trump, cleverly disguised as an attack on dictatorship, was a cry for help from some combination of mommy and daddy, the powerful welfare state working in conjunction with media and big business, selling us cool stuff, severely restricting the speech that is considered permissible. Not bothering about laws and constitutions. Greater diversity of gender and race is supposed to ensure a lot less diversity of views, since we are all now one big Disney family. Open borders will probably make First World countries much more like Third World ones. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in trouble.
I'm still working on Gulliver's Travels. The Yahoos in the fourth voyage are a harbinger of the future. Not particularly aggressive or dangerous, takers of punishment much more than givers. Obsessed with short-term pleasures including sex and hoarding shiny stones. Little or no articulate speech. The only drug seems to be some kind of alcohol, but there are frequent drunken parties. The wise Houyhnhnms or rational horses have come up with a hangover cure for the filthy lower beasts. Putting the whole book together, Swift may have thought that the Catholic Church got people into the habit of a kind of childlike docility; Protestantism promised more self-assertion or freedom, but on its own probably left people with too little structure, leadership, and hope. Modern science was the great new thing that could become a new church, while making the masses more servile than ever--waiting for the elite to deliver the next big thing. A promise not of happiness in an afterlife, but of a life on earth that is both longer and more comfortable. The Yahoos are left not remembering anything, barely hoping for anything, having no real idea what exactly the elites are up to, tending to believe or simply follow the most ridiculous and childish propaganda. Swift has political partisans, really following individuals, throwing shit at each other, driving the loser of a contest "down" so the rival can go "up." A Twitter storm is like the endless grunting of inarticulate animals pushing one of two buttons, "like" or "don't like."
Traditionalguy - Excellent and accurate observation. I became interested in Hus and his role while living in Prague a few years ago, and started studying that era and the Bohemian Reformation - 100 years ahead of that guy with a hammer and some nails.
traditionalguy - excellent and accurate observation. I became interested in Hus and his role while living in Prague a few years ago, and started studying the Bohemian Reformation (which began 100 years before that guy came along with a hammer and some nails).
Tesich was born nowhere near Jan Hus territory.
Siskel and Ebert loved Breaking Away, so did Emmett Tyrrell of the American Spectator. It was a Midwestern (or at least an Indiana-Illinois) thing. So were Ordinary People at about the same time, and the John Hughes films a little bit later.
Tesich's Four Friends was an interesting, quirky look back at the Sixties. It might be best watched along with other films about the era for nostalgic or pseudo-nostalgic reasons. Writing the script for The World According to Garp didn't do much for Tesich's reputation in my book.
The last thing we want now is for an intellectually and spiritually vigorous generation to confront us with the question of what we have done to this country.
Now we have a generation that endlessly confronts us, but intellectual and spiritual vigor were never possibilities.
I find a lot more kinship with the honest to goodness Left right now than anybody else. One thing about real lefties, not posers like you get on here, but the genuine article, is that their hatred for nazis is real, and they know nazis when they see them. What passes for leftism in America is just fascism, as they cheer on the FBI and DoJ, even the CIA and the neocons in their antidemocratic project. My belief is that we need them as allies, and we can hash out our differences later, when the danger to our democracy and freedom of speech and thought, is over.
What if our fundamental assumptions are keeping us from leaping forward. Could it be that the obvious reason why AI is running into a brick wall is because there is a lot more to the nature of things than the limited mechanistic Cartesian credits.
banned from Ted Talk Archives
Ted Talk takedown statement: “We feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.”
One way to feel better about the present is to read crap like this from the past.
Breaking Away is a great movie.
It's up on youtube!
boy that is a sketchy youtube video
call the cops!
Barbara Barrie played Barney Miller's wife. The character didn't appear much after the first season but in the premiere she glibly gave the crime-ridden context to NYC. Calling after kids heading out to school, "Take a crowded bus".
speaking of monsters...
Y'all KNOW, that the police are here to protect the villains from the public?
And, do y'all remember that kid? that ran over a mom and her baby?
What happens when the police FAIL?
Los Angeles hit-and-run driver who plowed into mom and baby in stolen car is murdered after light sentence
The 17-year-old wrong-way driving felon who ran over a mom and her infant was shot to death
The case made national headlines last year when Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon's office sought a five- to seven-month sentence in juvenile probation camp, a punishment for young offenders described as less severe than military school but harsher than summer camp.
Well! HARSHER THAN SUMMER CAMP!!! that IS harsh (no, wait a minute.. Nope, it's NOT)
Anyway, the villain has now been shot Dead.. Will the police (and DA,) spend ALL their time, looking to bring the shooter to 'justice'
Or, is that how things go now, in California???
You had the director of the FBI today - for some reason - an at economic conference.
In Switzerland - not in the US.
Mingling with the world's billionaires.
Discussing "public-private partnerships" which are now being used to suppress "misinformation." And how glad he is to see the "private sector" maturing into government actors, only too willing to take orders to delete this or that opinion, this or that person.
Think of the worst excesses of Orwell's 1984 and this US government is guilty of far greater sins. We either stop this now, or the golden city on the hill burns to the ground.
It is probably already too late, judging by how open they are with this. They used to do this stuff in secret.
It’s not so much that we’re living a post-truth dispensation but that we’ve, inadvertently & arrogantly perhaps, hidden the whole truth to ourselves. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. Luke 8:12
We’re looking with one eye tied behind our back… as it were.
Bill Zhang for the win. I noticed the exact same thing- what the fuck was Christopher Wray doing at Davos?
As good a novel as it is, I think 1984 got this wrong, as do most histories of Stalin's USSR and Hitlers's Germany. There were and always are enthusiastic supporters of totalitarianism. It's not all secret police and torture - it's children turning in their parents, Karens turning in their neighbors and majorl media platforms self-censoring.
The idea that a totalitarian monster will be recognizable is a fatal flaw number one.
As the saying goes... the answer is in the biggest trick the devil ever pulled.
why AI is running into a brick wall is because there is a lot more to the nature of things than the limited mechanistic Cartesian credits.
Science as a methodology (i.e. correlations), practice (i.e. limited frame of reference), and philosophy (i.e. near-domain without consensus) is incapable of discerning origin and expression.
real lefties, not posers like you get on here, but the genuine article, is that their hatred for nazis is real
Both are authoritarian in principle, and therein lies progress and forward-looking risk. The latter adopted diversity enhancements under an ethical religion with politically congruent constructs.
when the danger to our democracy and freedom of speech
The democratic/dictatorial duality. Fortunately, we have a constitution that places "the People" and "our Posterity" first, and limits the authority of government as a necessary evil.
That said, religion: morality in a universal frame, ethics its relativistic sibling, and laws their politically consensual cousin, for people capable of self-moderation, and competing interests to mitigate the progress of others to run amuck.
BIII Zhang said...
It is probably already too late, judging by how open they are with this. They used to do this stuff in secret
The NYT's reported today, that the US will be arming the Ukraine, for their strikes into the Crimea
When asked if this was an escalation, the US replied; "HELL YEAH!!! We'll be dropping Nukes Soon!"
So, Goodbye Cruel Neutrality, it's been fun
"Or, is that how things go now, in California???"
California, and many western states have a long vigilante culture. 7-3-77 is embroidered on the Montana Highway Patrol Emblem, a code for the old reprisers, the vigilantes.
The most recent instance of the vigilantes in California, in the early 1900's, was to send the communist union organizers in mining towns out of state. They were sent to Nevada, and were returned to California, then sent to Arizona. Reasonable, other states don't want your problems foisted on them.
Earlier vigilantes in California were mainly about hanging mining claim pirates. That is God's work. In Federal law jumping a claim is a civil tort, a capital crime by the code of the trail.
That Tesich passage is extraordinarily well written. We should stop and appreciate it. Forceful, clean, melodic, and, most surprisingly, the sentence structures are just complicated enough to make them interesting, but the reader never loses the train of thought.
A mini-masterpiece of writing.
Well considering Twitter and Facebook with the FBI and DOJ...
One can see we are heading toward suppression of free thought.
When government 'decides' what is 'harmful' speech they just get the owners of the websites to ban such thought.
Kind of like the UK and their 'D' notice. UK government can tell newspapers not to print what the deem is against the 'national interest'... I.E. what the government thinks you should not know.
BIII Zhang said... You had the director of the FBI today - for some reason - an at economic conference. In Switzerland - not in the US. Mingling with the world's billionaires. Discussing "public-private partnerships".
If the mainstream media reaction to the #twitterfiles, outing the end-run around constitutional restraints, is anything like a tell... that SOB was doing a celebration lap at Davos. In your face... you conspiracy theorist you.
I used to think this man was crazy. Poet and prophet of the internet times who died before there was an internet.
"I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
[The rest is at
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42869/i-am-waiting-56d22183d718a
Good to the last drop.
Who is this we you speak of, Kimosabe? Ain’t me.
In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.
Some yes. Most no. Me, not at all.
Yancey Ward asked: "What the fuck was Christopher Wray doing at Davos?"
I can tell you what he's NOT doing. He's NOT spending his time looking for the people on the FBI's Most Wanted List, which is his job and which we pay him to do, but which he is not spending his time doing.
Instead is hobnobbing with the world's oligarchs at a ski lodge.
This tells you who the FBI really works for and it ain't us.
See here
https://twitter.com/Ty_Clevenger/status/1616599569646714880?cxt=HHwWgIC8zcqvqO8sAAAA
Maybe Tesich ought to consider a 2023 forward to this essay, since it's now becoming common knowledge (thanks mostly to Tucker Carlson) that Nixon holds the record for landslide margins in his election, and that the CIA was likely working furiously behind the scenes to torpedo his Presidency, and that the Watergate investigation was at least partly a setup.
And now we're in the highly unserious age of "My opinions are so important, they are elevated to 'Truth', and you will not dare to question them" Turn it down, Tune it out, Look away, and Think for Yourself.
Tesich wrote that at about the time when the balance of power in the regime was changing. In the 1950s the country was largely governed by corporations and the government came down on their side. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a revolt against this. The federal government grew and shifted its spending away from the military. It became a force for change. Apart from the radical young, foundations and interest groups began to support the movement for change, and in Bill Clinton the Sixties generation began to assume power. Today the military, the surveillance agencies, and the corporations are on the same side as the foundations, the non-profits and interest groups. Everything has changed but it's still a "government of lies."
I loved Breaking Away when I watched it in the theatre. Fresh and original. As a graduate of an Ivy League university, I loved the poke at privilege and the working class nobility of the protagonist. I hoped for more movies of this caliber from Tesich.
If this lefty panty twister is still alive, he ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait for what the next two Biden years bring during the systematic demolition of our country.
The federal government grew and shifted its spending away from the military. It became a force for change. Apart from the radical young, foundations and interest groups began to support the movement for change
Nixon.
Today the military, the surveillance agencies, and the corporations are on the same side as the foundations, the non-profits and interest groups.
Palmerism... Obamaites... Bidenists.
I stumbled across Barbara Barrie a few weeks ago. I had watched Barney Miller back when it was on broadcast TV, but never saw all of the episodes--I probably watched it in syndication. Anyway, I stumbled across the show on one of the streaming services and immediately realized I'd never seen the early episodes--there was a lot of Barney Miller's home life, with his wife played by Barbara Barrie. I saw her and thought, isn't she the actress who played the mom in Breaking Away? Sure enough, she was. Something I'd forgotten, or perhaps never noticed at the time, was that Barbara Barrie played the mom of Goldie Hawn's in Private Benjamin.
I graduated from Indiana University Bloomington in 1975 with my B.A., and my wife in 1976 with her Master’s. Breaking Away was released in 79, so much of the location shots appear almost the same as when we were students there. We rewatch the film every couple of years and relive some of our student days.
is not nominalism in philosophy very much predate 'post-truthism'
and what is the difference between?
I raced the Little 500 in 1983, '84, '85 and '86. I rode for Phi Kappa Psi, as did Steve. I invited him to the race in 1986 and he graciously returned to Bloomington for the weekend. It is an all-time favorite memory.
I raced the Little 500 in 1983, '84, '85 and '86. I rode for Phi Kappa Psi, as did Steve. I invited him to the race in 1986 and he graciously returned to Bloomington for the weekend. It is an all-time favorite memory.
Post a Comment