In January of 2012, my healthy and spry 82-year-old father suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke. Though he would somehow miraculously survive and regain consciousness, the resulting brain damage left him radically altered both physically and mentally. He died quietly in his sleep a little more than two months later, after contracting an infection.
The federal coronavirus response reminds me of my father after his stroke, when he’d say things that were simply incompatible with reality
My father was a scientist, a rigidly logical mathematician who did The New York Times crossword puzzle in pen each day. He prized intellect above all else and had little patience for those who did not. And while there were occasional glimmers of his pre-stroke self during his convalescence — he could recall some sports trivia and still made the occasional clever joke — it was apparent that the person who inhabited his ravaged body was just… not him. The first time he could speak after having his tracheostomy tube removed, he excitedly told me that he’d won a historic jackpot in some kind of internet lottery. When I expressed skepticism, he told me to Google his name. “I think you’ll find it veeeery interesting,” he said mischievously.
But the most memorable of my father’s post-stroke fixations was his insistence that he had recently appeared on a stage at Hofstra University with George Gershwin, one of his musical heroes. My brothers and I found this both hilarious and horrifying. The idea of our supremely serious father asserting something so patently absurd provided some much-needed comic relief during an intense ordeal. (A friend once told me that after suffering a traumatic brain injury, her law professor father had maintained that he held the patent to a multimillion-dollar pasta product.)
In trying to determine the origin of this particular fantasy, my brother Andrew discovered that there was an upcoming performance of Gershwin songs at Hofstra, where my father had been a professor of computer science. We wondered if this might somehow be the event to which he was referring.
“When I say I saw George Gershwin,” my father snapped impatiently at Eric. “I mean he was IN ATTENDANCE!”
The weeks went by and my father continued to repeat this outlandish claim. In a meeting with his care team, I asked whether there was merit in pushing back when he said things that were demonstrably untrue. Sure, the therapists said. It’s okay to gently rein him in a bit, to try to anchor him in the here and now.
And so Eric tried.
The next time Dad mentioned his rendezvous with George Gershwin, Eric gently explained that Gershwin had actually died in 1937, some 75 years earlier.
“So you’re saying that’s incompatible with my having just seen him?” said my father sternly. I can picture his brow furrowing, see the hard lines of his nose and jaw.
“Yes,” Eric said.
But my father was resolute. “Well, I’m telling you it happened,” he said dismissively.
As I’ve watched the Trump administration and its media enablers respond with lie after lie about the cataclysmic coronavirus pandemic, I find myself thinking of my father and George Gershwin.
Almost daily during the coronavirus crisis, the American public is effectively being told that George Gershwin has recently appeared onstage, despite that being incompatible with his having died in 1937.
Donald Trump is telling you his administration has handled this crisis nobly and responsibly, but that is incompatible with a mountain of well-documented evidence about his actual behavior.
He is telling you that his nonsensical questions about the possible internal application of disinfectant were not directed to Deborah Birx, the global health official and coordinator to White House’s coronavirus response, when that is incompatible with the transcript and video in which he addresses her by name while looking straight at her.
Sean Hannity is telling you that Fox News “always took coronavirus seriously,” but that is incompatible with what they actually said.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is telling you that officials only learned in early April that the virus can be spread by asymptomatic people, but that is incompatible with information that was widely available months earlier.
We are in the midst of an all-out assault on truth, one with lethal consequences.
Gaslighting is nothing new for Trump and his minions, but with thousands of Americans suffering and dying, with the economy in tatters, and with the need for transparent leadership never more crucial, these lies have taken a grotesquely menacing turn. Unlike my father’s, these delusions are anything but amusing. We are witnessing a breathtaking display of willful malevolence, and a blatant disregard for truth. “This is not mere ignorance — it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times of Kemp.
I got my first real taste of this two years ago, when I co-wrote an article for the Washington Post about a popular but historically inaccurate meme about the 1924 Democratic Convention. Right-wing social media was essentially able to manufacture a fake historical “fact” to suit their political purposes, and no amount of pushing back with primary sources could stop its entrenchment. The stakes were seemingly low — so what if people believe something that’s not true about a 90-year-old political convention? — but the implications were massive. What could happen if there were no bedrock of fact to base our world view on?
I keep returning again and again to this recent Twitter thread, by Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose six-year-old daughter Ana Grace was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Márquez-Greene has long spoken out about the harassment she and fellow parents have received from people who insist that they are crisis actors and that no children actually died at Sandy Hook. “I tried to tell you about the damage. I told you about the privilege of this behavior & the underlying currents of toxic masculinity, distrust of government, anti-semitism, racism. FEAR,” she explained on Twitter. “I was trying to tell you there was danger to ALL of us when pain and reality are denied. The Holocaust. 9/11 Mass Shootings and now? Covid-19. Why? Because the same confluence of factors motivate these people. It’s about power and control. … We live the terror of pain denied.”
We are in the midst of an all-out assault on truth, one with lethal consequences. The “terror of pain denied.” It has never been more important to be resolute about what we know. George Gershwin died in 1937, so you can’t have just appeared onstage with him. Full stop. Even — or maybe especially — when someone is insisting, “Well, I’m telling you it happened.”