Speaking Truth to Power

One of the surprising things about being "old, alone, and at the edge of death" is a new redeeming perspective on telling truth to power.

The powerful do not like having truth spoken to them, as anyone who has ever tried it knows only too well. Solzhenitsyn cites an old Russian proverb at the end of his Nobel Speech which goes: one word of truth can change the world. Tolstoy says similar things in many places, in one of which he says that the rulers of the world know this very well, so they zealously guard against its emergence.

They say things to you like “You'll never work in this town again,” in its many variants but probably they just do their destruction on you long before you know a thing about it. A favorite twist on it is to threaten your family.

Some contemporary truth speakers who come to mind are Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Ellsberg.

I just loved McGovern confronting Donald Rumsfeld at a lecture that Rumsfeld had just given in Atlanta. McGovern took up Rumsfeld on his lie that he knew where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were – north, east, south and west of Tikrit and Baghdad. The audience started getting physical toward McGovern for being such a rogue, so impolite, as to confront Rumsfeld on an obvious lie. You know just from the way Rumsfeld cited each of the four directions, that he was pulling it out of his butt. They started going for him physically and he said “Hey, this is America!” It was a brilliant thing to say to such people, and it worked.

That little bit of truth speaking may have saved far more lives and had a bigger effect on the world that was first apparent. The reaction of the crowd was just everything I despise. A courageous, truthful man speaks the truth and thereby does untold good, and “Real Americans,” patriots, wannabes and hangers-on-to-the-system and apparatchiks and the arrogant try to stop, even to murder him with their mindlessness. If you try some truth-speaking you will likely get death threats, and when you go to the police for protection on these occasions you find out very quickly who side they are on. The police told me on one such occasion, “Well, if I were you, I would get out of town for at least three days.”

There were many times over the course of my life when I spoke truth and received that response. A big one was my refusal to participate in the Viet-Nam war. Another instance, perhaps even more dramatic in its clarity for me, was when I addressed the faculty of the community college where I had taught for about ten years. The community colleges where visionary, progressive, hopeful places when they first started, but as usually happens with such vision and hope, they became sclerotic, mind-numbing inferior copies of the same old repression that they were designed to overcome or at least ameliorate. A great vision soon becomes co-opted into its exact opposite: what was once a great movement accrues people who are really after money and respectability or ancient ego or hidden malice and they destroy it.

So I spoke to the faculty of this college about it, citing the implications of Plutarch's description of the mind as a fire to be kindled rather than a receptacle to be filled. I was, of course, vilified and voted down for telling the truth. I resigned the job, relatively well-paying and having tenure, at the end of that semester. There were only one or two faculty out of a hundred that supported me, and a third person said,”you are right, but I have a family to support.” She herself had tenure but she was still full of such fear and already so corrupted as not to come out openly in support of me. The anger at me over the meeting was so intense, and faces so red, that I felt things could have gotten physical, although they did not.

So now, in my old age at the end of my life, and having paid the price for truth-speaking, I have come to the realization of redemption. It's easier than ever for me and other old people to speak the truth – you're going to die any day now anyway, so it doesn't really matter even if they come shoot you in the heart, destroy your ability ever to get job again, or lock you in solitary for the rest of your life. That is actually true for anyone, taking anything like a large perspective. Life passes so very quickly.

I can now see with thanks and delight how good it was for me to have stuck with it despite the price, and I see, without any gloating or vindictiveness, what happens to those who do not stick by it. They become so debased and corrupted that they are incapable of redeeming themselves. It's much too long a task - I would say impossible - if they have a massive load of lies they have lived on and under.

There have been late-in-life “conversions,” at the death bed, and all that. But William James would say that such conversions are not immediate acts, but have been in preparation for a long time previously, on the subconscious level particularly.

Every word I have written here is the truth, and I know that there are people out there in the USA who would gladly kill me for writing it, but it doesn't bother me now, yes because I've had ”a glimpse of the promised land,” but also death will definitely happen any day now.