The truth shall set you free

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." – Mark Twain. Or Winston Churchill.

No doubt you’ve seen it when you open your email — it’s always forwarded by the same folks, and it usually starts with a blaring headline like, "You’re not going to BELIEVE this one!!!!"

You open it, thinking, "Oh, I better open it then, maybe it’s a YouTube video of something cool like a dog shooting a rifle while riding on a horse," but you’re sorely disappointed to find that it’s a bit… political… in nature. How can you tell? Why, the first line, of course.

"OBAMA’S MUSLIM CURTAINS SHOW THAT HE IS GUN-HATING ANTICHRIST BENT ON DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA!!!!!!"

It’s all in capitals, and there’s a lot of exclamation points, because these things are exciting!

The subjects can vary, but they’re mostly about things like Jane Fonda beating American prisoners in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Denzel Washington paying the entire cost of constructing a veterans hospital, or Obama acknowledging on video that he’s not an American citizen. (Surprise!)

Unfortunately, exciting though these stories may be, they’re not true. In fact, most aren’t even based on a kernel of truth and are entirely made up to inflame the passions of the uninformed and hopelessly gullible.

The misinformation hasn’t stopped there. Social media sites have allowed this plague to reach epidemic proportions. Think about it: how many times have you come across a meme of a Founding Father’s portrait with some political slogan plastered across it that has a hundred likes and 20 shares from those who aren’t even sure if what they’re seeing is a real quote?

Allegedly both sides of the political spectrum do this, but in my experience one side is far more willing than the other to reconstruct history via internet, and they are rarely called on it. It’s as if with the advent of the search engine, all source material has been burned, and all we have left is brainyquote.com. I’m not sure people understand how truly dangerous this sort of thing is, in that Orwellian "who controls the past, controls the future" kind of way. 

Think for a second what the power to attach your chosen phrase to anyone in history actually does — is there any more valuable tool in persuasive speaking?

Concise, witty quotes that prove a point while giving little room for retort are priceless when it comes to swaying opinions. In advertising they become catchphrases, in presidential debates, "zingers," and one need look no further than our own history to find examples of how small, quotable treatises like "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" influenced the political discourse of the time and, by consequence, the history of the world.

That history, like a shadow dancing on the wall, is hard enough to grasp as it is because it’s cast by a candle that can be filtered and manipulated to serve this purpose or that. But if it can be blatantly rewritten like the ending of poorly done sitcom — and if we actually encourage its rewriting — how can we ever know who we are?

Think of it like this: everything we are as individuals is based on where we’re from and how we came up. It’s what our parents were like, what neighborhood we lived in, who our friends were, and what we’ve been through that shapes our personalities and, by proxy, our future. 

The nation itself is no different. The storms we’ve come through shine the light on where we are headed as a people, and to selectively change our back story is to rob the ship of its rudder.

So next time some asinine e-mail with a headline caterwauling about something that seems too ridiculous (or too good) to be true comes your way, take a second to do a little research before you hit "forward" or "share."

Go to snopes.com, or factcheck.org, type in what you just read, and see if it’s as real as the writer wants you to think it is. Consider it your civic duty, and a personal favor to all of history.

More often than not, you will be surprised what you learn.

And when in doubt, remember Abraham Lincoln’s words of wisdom: "90 percent of what you read on the Internet is BS."

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

Wake me up when November ends

BY STEVE JANOSKI

With five months left until the fateful day, the general election circus of national politics is roaring with all of its pitiful melodrama, boring speeches, and media pundits who are hired simply to hash, rehash, and re-rehash what the boring speeches and pitiful melodrama all means to the nation.

I try to ignore the up-to-the-minute minutia because I am not one might call a "swing voter." (See "one who votes for a different set of principles every four years.") I know where I stand and I vote accordingly, and that more or less keeps me above the fray.

But I can never help but worry about the effect that all of the garbage "narratives" have on the outcome of a given election, and while petty issues have always been a part of politics, one could easily be inundated with worthless information due to the incessant tickers of the 24-hour news cycle.

The latest "story" to gain traction has come from the Republican camp. The GOP, desperate to win back the ever-important dog-lover vote in the wake of criticism over Mitt Romney's practice of strapping his dog's crate to car roofs for long trips, has attacked President Obama over a passage in his autobiography where he states that he ate dog meat while living in Indonesia at the age of 7 — at the age of 7.

Although it's disgusting that the election has gotten to this point already, I know where it comes from, and I can't say I'm surprised. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan explained it concisely when she said, "There are literally thousands of people in the United States now who are employed to cover these campaigns minute by minute, and they need something to say."

I, however, was truly hoping that they'd say something of a bit more consequence that doesn't further encourage this awful practice of digging further and further back into a candidate's past to "expose" innocuous, meaningless events and shape them to reflect on that person's ability to lead.

Evidently, if one holds the slightest notion of running for president some day, they must watch every step and guard every action from childhood onwards so as to not give the media fodder in 35 years when they decide to put their name on a ticket.

Many of the presidents whose names decorate the very top of the "Greatest U.S. Presidents" lists would likely not even be seen as near electable today if the current standards had been applied to them.

Andrew Jackson, the legendary general nicknamed "Old Hickory," was a quarrelsome man who had killed an attorney in a duel 22 years before he was elected. It was said that he had taken so many bullets as a result of the practice that he "rattled like a bag of marbles."

Did that make him "unfit to lead?" Or, perhaps, in today's terms, "unelectable?"

Thomas Jefferson is another. His indiscretions with his own slaves have been slowly revealed over the centuries, and one can't help but wonder if they would have been laid out in detail the day after it was announced that he'd be writing the Declaration of Independence had Fox News been around.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt married his own fifth cousin. JFK couldn't keep his hands off of women, before or after being elected. Ulysses S. Grant (along with many other presidents, including W) was known as a heavy drinker in his youth. Lincoln was, well, ugly, as well as a borderline depressive.

And some of the finest leaders from other countries — Winston Churchill springs to mind — would never be allowed near the highest office given their natures.

Leaders, no matter how perfect they seem, are still just people. They are flawed. They screw up, they falter when others push on, they lose faith, they regret.

But elections are not about the past. They're about looking toward the future and putting faith in the intellectual ability of a candidate to set a strong course for the country and drag it toward that objective.

It's not about being a celebrity, and it's not about being perfect. It's about being the right fit for the nation at the time it needs them most. Like Jackson. Like Jefferson. Like Roosevelt. Like Lincoln.

It's troublesome that this country, which once prided itself on being the land where one could forget the past, forge a new life, and meet with unbridled success (so much so that it became known as the "American Dream") seems to be on this path of making the ghosts in one's closet the focus of so much attention.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com