In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel on the pointlessness of war, the tragicomic soldier-hero, Billy Pilgrim, overhears his friend Rosewater telling a psychiatrist: ‘I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.’ If we equate the shrink with the establishment, Rosewater makes a lot of sense.
In a democracy, our basic freedom is to determine the leader to give a voice to our favourite fiction. Lies are not entirely pejorative—they could be aspirations, such as when we dress up to hide our poverty or when an elderly person goes easy on his age so he won’t be counted out. A lie is a wish, a hope. Only a few leaders can offer it with conviction.
This November, it is the turn of the Americans to elect their leader. In short, they must choose what lies they will be told, and by whom.
There was a time when a guide to the electoral world in the US was the media. But with the legacy media losing its authority and the emergence of the new social media—in which every consumer is a potential authority, broadcasting his or her version of the world—the old guidelines do not hold. A billionaire like Elon Musk, with 200 million followers on X, has greater reach than most newspapers. Typically, Musk goes against the idea of all traditional wisdom. If the world is a coin, Musk is ever flipping it.
In one corner, we see the traditional American media—The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN—teaming up with the Democrats fronted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The other, alternative media is personified by Musk, whose takeover of Twitter (now X) was intended to “destroy the woke virus”.
As authority in general is undermined— a play-out begun by the Woke in their fight for justice for the historically suppressed races and genders— the Americans are realising they are living through an age without heroes.
Trump, despite being a billionaire, positions himself as the anti-elite candidate. This was the man who, playing himself in the reality show The Apprentice, made a fetish of firing people at the drop of a nickel. He now sells himself as the new white hope, sympathetic to the underachievers of inner America.
While the US is deeply divided on many domestic issues—immigration, abortion rights, economy and social justice—both Democrats and Republicans seem united in their support for Israel, though that country’s offensive in Gaza has been disproportionate.
Why is there such a consensus, even as progressive factions within the Democratic Party express discomfort over the Gaza crisis? The answer lies in the interests of the military-industrial complex. For decades, Israel has been one of the largest recipients of US military aid, and American defence contractors immensely benefit from this arrangement.
Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing have seen billions in profits from defence contracts with Israel. In 2023, Lockheed Martin alone reported $66 billion in net sales with a significant portion of that coming from foreign military sales, including to Israel. Republican or Democrat, the US cannot do without wars. Remember the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on the threat of non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Hundreds of thousands lost their lives. As I said, in a democracy we get to decide who speaks the lie. But there is a little more to it this time—if Trump wins, so does X. But not the NYT—which, incidentally, had supported the Iraq invasion.
No matter who wins, though, the American ‘deep state’ goes untouched. Now that is a truth. If you mess with that, the world order changes. Deep down, few of us are ready for it: we are mostly a bit of liars ourselves.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)