Buechner: The truth on lying

We read this last night after supper. It's from Frederick Buechner, who has been at the heart of our daily altar for some time now, a Buechner collection titled Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith.

What came up last night, a paragraph on "Truth," is relevant any time, but eerily so last night and yet this morning:

There is perhaps nothing that so marks us as human as the gift of speech. Who knows to what degree and in what ways animals have the power to communicate with each other, but to all appearances it is only a shadow of ours. By speaking, we can reveal the hiddenness of thought, we can express the subtlest as well as the most devastating of emotions, we can heal, we can make poems, we can pray. All of which is to say we can speak truth--the truth of what it is to be ourselves, to be with each other, to be in the world--and such speaking as that is close to what being human is all about. What makes lying an evil is not only that the world is deceived by it, but that we are dehumanized by it.

Russian troops have finally crossed the line in Ukraine. Why? Because, or so says Putin, they're sorely needed to protect Russian-speakers of the region, who've been suffering at the hands of radical Ukrainians, supposedly. Therefore, Putin calls his troops "peacemakers." 

Peacemakers. 

It's not only the troops, but the rest of us, from throughout the world, are "dehumanized" by falsehood.

I couldn't help thinking yesterday as the Russian leader rambled on about how it was that the Ukraine was somehow mystically part of God-given Russia, that maybe--just maybe--some of the horrific polarization we've suffered in the last five years, how maybe the royal gorge that separates us and inflicts damage on the national psyche might be somehow mitigated by any united effort we can forge to keep Putin from gorging himself on more land. He's a thug, a killer, a 21st century Stalin.

But Tucker Carlson seems bound and determined to dig the royal gorge even deeper. It might be overstated to claim he's established his support for Putin and the invading forces moving into the Ukraine right now, but, most certainly, Tucker has not condemned Putin's military action. 

Why not? Good question, but the millions of American minds he shapes every night will turn elsewhere Tucker Carlson is suddenly tamed into just another voice on America media. If Tucker condemns Putin, he loses his uniqueness, and his uniqueness--not the truth--is what Tucker Carlson is all about.

Tucker is not going anywhere, I suppose, because what's clear to him, to those who follow him, and even to those who, like me, would rather lick a February pump handle, is that he has to support--you know what?--THE BIG LIE.

"What makes lying an evil is not only that the world is deceived by it," Buechner says, "but that we are dehumanized by it."

All of us. 

Dehumanized.