Defend Truth

Opinionista

The Other News Round-Up: The universe of alternative fact

Marelise van der Merwe and Daily Maverick grew up together, so her past life increasingly resembles a speck in the rearview mirror. She vaguely recalls writing, editing, teaching and researching, before joining the Daily Maverick team as Production Editor. She spent a few years keeping vampire hours in order to bring you each shiny new edition (you're welcome) before venturing into the daylight to write features. She still blinks in the sunlight.

In a weekly column, Daily Maverick takes a look at some of the left-of-centre news around South Africa and the world. This week: #FreeMelania, Kellyanne Conway does stand-up, and an apparent virgin birth in the animal kingdom.

You know you’re living in the era of alternative facts when politics local and abroad are more surreal than, say, a miraculous virgin birth by an aquarium shark or the fact that British police have tased their own race relations adviser (yes, they really did that – you can pick your jaw up off the floor). You can Google “strange news” all you want, but you can’t top the fact that a moth with a bad hairdo has been named after the American president. That, plus your own country’s ruling party is caught planning fake news and fake posters for the opposition, damage control for a list of scandals so long you couldn’t rattle them off in one go any more than you can remember the precise location of Tegucigalpa. It’s a “love campaign”, though, remember – not a smear campaign.

You can’t make this stuff up.

You’d think, with publicity and branding being the Big Deal it is, that we’d be getting better at it. As a human race, I mean. Learn to do something smarter than just lie. But when even a bear – the latest avant garde artist coming out of Helsinki – has the good sense to recognise a potential PR nightmare and hibernate through his exhibition opening, you have to ask why humans can’t figure out when to lie low and do the same.

I’m betting Melania Trump wishes she could have hibernated through that inauguration. Despite her support of her husband through his presidential campaign, I can’t shake the nagging feeling she’s trying to perfect the full-body eye-roll. (You and me both, honey.) If you missed this video, you can catch up via the #FreeMelania campaign, which despite its tongue-in-cheek approach to an apparently long-suffering Melania, seems to have Trump supporters rising in a faithful froth. “Mr Mike [Pence],” one wrote on Facebook in response to #FreeMelania, “[T]he Lord will be guide you (sic) he will give you wisdom knowledge. I will pray for you always.” And then, helpfully: “I am a prophet.”

There’s a pattern to these PR nightmares, whether here or in the US. First it’s a lie, then it’s a media plot, and if all else fails and the facts just keep popping up like the world’s worst game of Whack-a-Mole, raise up a smiting finger and say God is on your team. Ain’t nobody gonna argue with God. More to the point, God isn’t going to argue with you.

Maybe the increasingly transcendental tone of Trump’s support choir was what made the ANC nervous enough to consider forking out for that questionable campaign in the first place. It’s one thing to have God on your side in South Africa, but the US is a whole other level of rapture. And if the Messiah is en route, everyone had better look busy. Picture the memo: URGENT. Jesus coming. Scrap existing campaign. New campaign to really pop. Tks!

There’s a bit of competition among prophets, though, with even uber conspiracy theorist David Icke surfacing to throw out a few apocalyptic predictions about Trump, the Illuminati, and related devilry, mostly based on a combination of his own bent for prophecy and a series of meticulously analysed hand movements. (I did not research whether groping women counts.) Icke, if you recall, kept a low profile after unsuccessfully attempting to convince the world he was the son of God. Sadly, even The Mirror was sceptical. Recently, he emerged from the woodwork to tell people their votes didn’t matter since the election was rigged. Icke, interestingly, is not a Trump supporter, but has nonetheless endowed him with powers beyond the ordinary man. Trump, he argues, was placed to destroy the Republicans so that his friend Hillary could become president, citing a picture of a smiling Trump with the Clintons as evidence. Diabolically brilliant, isn’t it? Except that Hillary could have become president by, you know, just sidestepping that whole Trump thing and saving tens of millions of women from backstreet abortions.

Sorry about that last bit. I forgot this is a no-logic zone.

What I meant was: the fight here is between fact and fiction, and I’m wondering why some are, by order of humanity, divinely exempted from reality. Clearly forces beyond our control are at work, and I don’t mean stupidity or a lack of ethics. Facts, it appears, are losing; if we want leadership, we need to look beyond the details into the alternative facts – for instance, whether our leaders are divinely anointed, chosen by an ancient society, or destined to reign until the Second Coming. (Political analysis be damned.) This suspension of disbelief isn’t hard, I’m told  one simply picks a saviour and rebrands any criticism as blasphemy.

It gives a whole new ring to the term “believer”, doesn’t it?

Icke didn’t make the cut, and the latest miraculous birth was a shark; so the position for Vice Messiah is, as far as we know, still wide open. This means two things: our own president will probably still be in office for a while, and Agent Orange and his fans still have some time to entertain their delusion that he’s acting on God’s behalf. But competition is stiff – even a Lord of the Rings elf is in the running as a modern-day saint – so if any of these folks are to be believed, we regular folk should just take cover and wait for sanctification. Our voices, after all, do not matter.

In all seriousness, though, it intrigues me that two of the most embarrassing presidents I can think of this week do seem to occupy an almost god-like status both in their own minds and among those who still believe in them, despite being possibly the least saintly people that spring to mind. I’m trying to figure out how this airbrushing works – sometimes I myself like to believe that what I’m reading in the news is a cosmic accident that will get cleared up very soon – but denial is a river in Egypt. Facts, beside the cult of personality, don’t stand a chance.

In South Africa, of course, we have loads of practice drifting in between these worlds of fact and fantasy; we have the SABC and the Guptas telling us what’s what. In 2016, for example, Faith Muthambi, cool as a cucumber, spoke of “editorial decision, or ‘censorship’, as they call it now”. Conway, by comparison, wouldn’t know spin if it marched up and yanked her onto a dance floor. For that matter, we should probably hook up Ben Ngubane with the Trump administration; there’s a bloke who can drum up an alternative fact if ever we saw one.

If liars and spinners have the right end of the stick, it’s really just down to how well the yarn is spun and what you’re willing to believe. Post-fact era, folks. That’s a fact. Kidding. So postmodern it hurts, except I’m told this is no longer a fashionable thing to say in academic circles, so the post-truth brigade is coming in a couple of decades late. Still, they know a good thing when they see it. A winning strategy is timeless, and lying never goes out of style. Even the humblest of Trump followers seem to have caught on to the power of perception and the choice to believe, repeating nonsense until it sinks in. (One, a bemused friend reported, claimed on Facebook that family planning clinics were “fraud organisations” selling baby parts. Baby parts? I puzzled. When last did I see a baby repair shop?)

Conway made an uncharacteristically honest – and prescient – statement a full two decades ago, when she described herself as a pundette, or “someone who says the same thing over and over, but never wearing the same outfit twice” in this clip of her stand-up comedy debut. Many a true word spoken in jest. I do worry that this is our world now: if one says something enough times, it becomes true. Or dominant, which is for practical purposes the same thing. At least the University of Seattle has jumped in with the recent addition of their “calling BS” course – already hugely popular.

The jury is still out on how South Africa will deal with its parallel universes of fact and fiction. So far, the rose-coloured glasses are dropping off thick and fast, and our PR prophets are in a frantic scramble to keep the faith. But facts keep popping up, inconveniently, like mushrooms. It’s a tight race, and it appears the facts are gaining ground.

So what do we do in the meantime, here and abroad? What do we do when the truth is more elusive than the Where’s Wally fugitive? Repeat it, I guess, until it’s as true as the alternative. Game on. DM

Gallery

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider

Every seed of hope will one day sprout.

South African citizens throughout the country are standing up for our human rights. Stay informed, connected and inspired by our weekly FREE Maverick Citizen newsletter.