True Facts and Our Political Process

When I was teaching freshman composition at the University of Hawaii, I used to find little tricks to remind students about various writing faux pas. When it came to redundancy (saying the same thing twice), my colleague, Lillian, turned me on to the idea of "babby puppies." A puppy is already a baby, I told my students. It must have worked, because they always aced redundancy on the quizzes and often used the term when critiquing one another's work.

Until now, I would have said that "true fact" was just such a baby puppy. But, thanks to the wonderful folks who are part of our current political process, I'm not so sure.  It seems there are facts and then there are "facts."

I hadn't thought that the word "fact" was that controversial. I'm with Pilate in asking the meaning of "truth," but then the concept of truth gets into a whole ethical/philosophical debate over first causes and infinite repercussions (as in who goes to hell and so forth). But facts? Webster says it's what actually exists, something experienced directly, and something known to be true (there's that pesky truth again).

Still, the way I have always used it, a "fact" is something that can be proved by something called evidence. It's like being pregnant--there's no being a little bit pregnant: you either are or you aren't.
A fact is or it isn't.

Apparently, I'm wrong.

It all started with Sarah Palin and her rewiting of Paul Revere's ride, which led to so many people trying to rewrite the Wikipedia article that the site had to be shut down. She decided that Paul was riding out on some kind of NRA crusade for the right to bear arms. That so many people wanted that to be real suggests to me that the word "fact" is slipping its moorings. It seems to be surging ahead into the absyss of "It's a fact because I want it to be."

In other words, given that somewhere these gleeful would-be lexicographers were exposed to the real Paul Revere if only briefly, that poor little word, fact, has now  morphed into meaning faith and belief. And, as we all know, faith and belief are among the most elastic of words, unaccountable to anyone for what they choose to mean.

Today, we get politicians, one after the other, distorting what I would grudgingly call "reality"--define that one, someone, please (after reading Why Does E=MC Squared?, I'm not sure about reality either). The disconnect between what the data show and the conclusions drawn from it is rather breathtaking.

Well--I'm going to take an English teacher's stand here. Please let's leave the word fact for things we can prove scientifically (as in research, empirical experiment, and surveys and such). And let's use the word "opinion" for those things we enjoy spouting to the world without benefit of proof or logic.

Believe me, I don't want to deny myself or others the pleasure of watching demagoguery--it's great fun. But as my British mum used to say, it's mutton done up as lamb. She was talking about people not acting their age, but you get the idea. Let's leave facts out of this and stop hitting one another over the head with our ignorance and insulting our intelligence by calling it a "fact."

If you have to call it a "true fact"--it's probably not.