To a degree, polite society requires all of us to conceal our true feelings. We smile appreciatively when our hostess presents us with a plate of something we really don’t feel like eating.
We express unfelt rapture when we receive gifts we don’t particularly want. We downplay some bit of personal good news in the presence of an unhappy friend.
And when someone asks, “What do you truly think?” we are often very, very careful not to say quite all that goes through our minds.
So it’s not dishonesty in the darkest sense that keeps us from speaking unalloyed truth at all times; it’s dishonesty as social emollient. Without a bit of elision, our relations with one another would be even coarser and more combative than they already are.
Here’s the problem. A bit of fibbing oils the works, but too much of it — too much false enthusiasm, too much suspended criticism, too much avoiding saying what we really mean — and people lose their bearings.
I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t going on now, in our body politic. I mean: Where do people really stand? Do you know? We are swathed in evasions.
The weird thing is that in an era when anyone can express himself with as much wild-eyed abandon as he likes, on the Internet or at the National Press Club (see Wright, Jeremiah), so many Americans aren’t being straight.
It’s like the whole country is doing a dance of the seven veils, removing one gauzy layer at a time, as slowly as possible. Only in November will we — and what we really think — be revealed.
In this election cycle, we’ve had Republicans temporarily registering as Democrats in the hopes of distorting state primary results.
This is Rush Limbaugh’s now-suspended “Operation Chaos,” though of course Limbaugh was not the first to promote such tactics, and Republicans haven’t been alone in using them.
So Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania — but how many of her supporters weren’t really hers? We won’t know until November.
We’ve had Democrats in the Philadelphia suburbs assuring pollsters before Pennsylvania’s primary vote that they backed the glamorous Sen. Barack Obama.
Then, in the privacy of the voting booth, they expressed another view.
Will they really not support a black candidate? We won’t know until November.
Many Obama-leaning superdelegates are reportedly keeping a wary silence for strategic reasons. They don’t want to declare themselves prematurely for fear they’ll get caught favoring the wrong side if the famously vindictive Clintons prevail.
Alas, the superdelegates don’t have until November, poor things; they’ll be stripped of their veils and exposed in all their political nudity in August, at the Democratic National Convention.
Part of everyone’s problem is that it has become acceptable to express only certain views, to follow only certain narratives, and if your private thoughts depart from these, you’d better keep ’em private.
There is only one way for whites to think about skin color, for instance, which is that it shouldn’t matter and we are all brothers and the same inside, etc. So if whites lean toward white candidates, this demonstrates their natural racism.
Yet if blacks lean toward black candidates, why, nothing could be more natural.
Even as I write this, I find myself worrying whether I’ve already said too much, whether any white columnist is permitted to make even bland observations on this radioactive subject.
Which points to the tallest tale of all: That Americans need a “national conversation” about race. Not likely! It’s not a real conversation if people have to follow a script.
