Hijacking Hypocrisy

People used to tell me that right and wrong was black and white, that for someone to talk about doing right while they were doing wrong was hypocritical. Growing up in a Christian family, my first memorable exposure to this was a pastoral affair, Jimmy Swaggart, whose tearful, national apology was broadcast on the television in 1988, back when I was eleven. He wasn’t from my church, but I remember feeling sorry for him because he wanted forgiveness from God and from the people of his congregation. As time went on, I started to see more and more people in a similar fall from grace, pastor and layperson alike, putting on that Sunday face for the crowd, then getting caught in some kind of behavior or decision that ran contrary to the pure and holy life they talked about wanting to have.

As a child, and even as a teenager, I struggled with these religious ideals, believing first that perfection was actually attainable, but also that anyone who messed up was forgivable, so long as they acknowledged their wrongs and sought to make them right, to get back on that road to perfection. Nevermind that I was a train wreck of my own contradictions, gracious and empathetic on the one hand, but verbally abusive, violently impatient, and filled with uncontrollable rage on the other. Rolling into my twenties, I let go of my belief in human perfection and got really good at apologizing, at seeing the plank in my own eye before anyone pointed it out, then going to make things right with whomever I had wronged. And by the time I reached my thirties, a little more educated, a little more well-read, I spent most of my time as the moderate, trying to put out fires in religious debates that no one really cared about, save for the one or two people or small groups that I stood between.

I didn’t leave the church because of all these contradictions, neither in my life or those who stayed, but my departure from Christianity happened to coincide with a growing shift in American life, one that was there long before I noticed it, growing far worse as I neared my forties, the rise and arrival of the 2016 Election, its aftermath, and a host of citizens now branded by their indestructible loyalty to an individual at the expense of all else. For someone as longwinded as myself, I’ve actually had a hard time finding words to explain this thing I call the hijacking of hypocrisy, but it’s been bugging me for years, so I’m gonna try.

First, it’s not the obvious hypocrisy that bothers me. I mean, it does, but not in the same way. To give you an example, when I was seventeen, our youth pastor was kicked out of the church on accusations that he had molested seven boys in our youth group. It happened so fast that I never even got a chance to say goodbye, let alone confirm whether it was true, because that’s how quickly the accusations became gospel. That’s how quickly people responded with condemnation to a claim of impropriety. And we all got the message, that victims and accusers have a pretty big voice.

But in 2018, when Roy Moore was accused of illicit relationships with teenage girls, or in 2019, when Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, or when the president himself was accused of paying off a porn star with campaign funds, the same kinds of people who kicked out pastors and church leaders all my life became the first in line to defend these men, claiming that the victims were liars, that the whole thing was a sham, the spawn of partisan attacks, rather than the claims being authentic and authenticated on their own, as they would have been in any church or business elsewhere. That’s what I mean when I talk about obvious hypocrisy. It’s disgusting and egregious, at the most public and blatant levels. But it’s also based around isolated individuals.

The kind of hijacked hypocrisy that I’m talking about, the kind that gets under my skin the most, the kind that’s the hardest to catch or explain, is the flipping of words and ideas that might have made sense to everyone before, but now cause utter confusion among the masses. What I’m talking about is more like a violation of conversational and verbal copyright. Let’s take a couple of simple examples: fake and fact.

All of us once knew that fake things were counterfeit, intentionally created to seem like the real thing but to different, cheaper, easier ends. A fake Rolex. A fake diamond. A fake ID. There was even a time when we could all sit down and watch Saturday Night Live, or The Daily Show, or The Colbert Report, and acknowledge that they were basically poking fun at the system, pretending to be journalists and reporters, but all in good fun. And no political party was without its vulnerability in the world of actual fake news. On the other side of the aisle, real news was simply that which provided the day’s briefing, relaying as many stories from the local, state, and national marquee as might fit into the broadcast, correcting errors where they might be found and holding accountable those who intentionally pass along falsehoods.

Like SNL, there was a time when we could all put the news on in the background and know that whether we liked it or not, they were doing their best to inform us of what they believed was important. No question that bias existed in the organizations and the people who reported, but we didn’t accuse it of unilateral mistrust. Not until the rebranding of “fake news” by a man who simply didn’t want to hear anything that made him sound or look bad, even when that thing that made him look bad was his own words or his own actions being called into question. And now that phrase, fake news, is so systemic, so commonplace and upside down that everyone uses it to point fingers, leaving a void of trust at the most basic level, simple information about what is and is not happening in the world.

Then last Tuesday, the Vice President used a phrase that most of us probably laughed at, reminding me of this deeper, underlying frustration. More than once, he said, “You’re entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts,” a line once made famous by a Democratic Senator from New York. And to be clear, a conservative politician borrowing that line from a liberal one is more trite that hypocritical, so that’s not what got under my skin. What got under my skin was the implied notion that he, his party, and this president, have themselves been operating and leading based on facts, despite endless members of the party espousing lines like, “you have a different set of facts,” or “ours are just alternative facts,” or “we don’t need the facts, we just know.” In other words, facts themselves, provable pieces of information, still exist, but a huge cross section of our society, those bowing to the president’s every word against any other, have decided that facts are just another word for partisan opinions.

And it doesn’t end with words like fake and fact. Going into the 2016 Election, the campaign was pre-emptive in its efforts to brand the word “criminal” with the other party, despite their own blatant criminality, many members of the campaign now incarcerated or indicted for illegal acts. They branded the other party with words like “dishonest” and “vicious,” despite being exhaustive in their own lies and their own malicious behavior to the harm of anyone who got in their way, the careless Muslim bans, the heartless separation of border families, the flippant rollback of clean air and water regulations at the EPA, the aggressive efforts to end health protections for those with less means, and the list goes on. What kept driving me crazy was how relative these basic words became. You can’t refer to criminality, or dishonesty, or viciousness with everyday Americans because those words have already been branded and, well, hijacked. Whatever they once meant universally they now mean more narrowly.

All of which leads me to this final point. Hypocrisy used to have a shelf life. You could talk one way and behave another, but you’d either collapse under the weight of your own guilt or someone would catch you. Either way, you’d have to stand on the other side of it and make amends. Lance Armstrong. Bill Clinton. Tonya Harding. Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, hypocrisy itself no longer has much of a meaning because those in the present administration and those who enable them have mastered the art of noncomformity, meaning that they have no norms, no rules, no line to abide by or avoid crossing. And without any regulation, without any restriction, no accusation ever sticks, even when those accusations are provably true. We’re all so goddamn confused by the lack of balance that we often try and get off the ride, letting them just go on about doing whatever it is they want to do, because you can’t effectively call someone out for a wrong if, for them and everyone who surrounds them, there is no wrong.

As an independent voter, there’s no question that I’m willing to vote for members of any party for any reason at any time, just as I have in the past for reasons that varied on issues and policy. But right now, I’m not voting for a party. Not really. I’m voting for the hope of normality. I’m voting for a nation where words and actions and decisions and consequences have meaning again. I’m voting for a nation where hypocritical leaders of any and every party are held accountable by the people who elect them, where fake things are recognized for what they are in good humor, where facts are trusted by those with the power to use them, where criminality, dishonesty, and viciousness are a universal outrage. I’m also voting for a world where it’s okay to be wrong, to apologize and try to make amends. I’m sure I won’t get all that from my vote, but I sure would love to get some of it.