What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of your time fretting because right wingers have grown incredibly bold about bald-faced lying, and so far it seems there's literally nothing that can be done about it. We have extensive freedom of speech protections, which is a good thing of course, but leaves us with few options to stem the ever-growing tide of lies emanating from a right wing that knows that it can't make an honest argument. The mainstream media has basically abandoned its mission to correct lies with the truth. Some publications continue to fact check claims made by pundits, activists, and politicians, but it's just not enough to counter the endless stream of lies and misinformation coming from the right. That's why Fox News hates Media Matters so much---they have a machine-like approach to the lies, just debunking them in real time.

-Amanda Marcotte

I will propose to you that this is a form of derangement. I fret about my grandfather's health. I fret about who to invite for dinner. I fret about not calling old friends often enough. I think about politics; I write about society; I am even capable of getting angry about it; but it never worries me. I try to stick to human concerns. To spend one's hours consumed by anxiety that no one is rigorously stemming "the endless stream of lies and misinformation coming from the right"; to wonder with slight regret if our "extensive freedom of speech protections" might be the prime vector of pandemic dishonesty; to worry that the organs of state media are insufficiently corrective of state-issued lies; is to consciously choose to live in a state of self-imposed insanity.  The state is a lie.  Money is a lie.  The law is a lie.  Basically, as Ms. Marcotte would say, the entire perceptual frame into which these fretful concerns are riveted is an architecture of lies.  The problem is not that the right-wing is lying and the media or the Democrats or whomever are failing in their mission from god; the problem is that there is no right-wing or mainstream media or Democrats; all of these taxonomic distinctions describe what are at best mere ephemera.  The human society into which these ideas and categories are embedded is itself a colossal falsehood; that it is a widely-shared delusion makes it no less false.  Arguing about the nature of left-vs-right-wing perfidy is like crafting a careful scientific explanation of the physics of dreams.  Denise Levertov once wrote a poem called "Everything that Acts Is Actual."  True.  But also: everything that acts is, well, acting.