Please Lie to Me

the progressive Left reminds me of an enabled elementary-aged caricature of myself

I’m a baseball nut — not so much now as I was when I was a kid, but still a nut. When I recently reconnected with a childhood friend who I hadn’t seen in some 45 years, one of the first questions he asked was, “Are you still as much of a baseball nut as you were back then?”

Baseball was always my first choice of games to play outside. I talked about it constantly and fantasized about the new glove I was saving up to buy. With no teams remotely close enough to our family’s western Nebraska home to have a “local” favorite, I left it to my baseball cards to inspire my favorite team.

I just happened to have a Hobie Landrith card. Landrith was a journeyman catcher who played for 14 years in the majors, first with the Reds, then the Cubs, Cardinals and Giants. He was a lifetime .233 hitter and only hit 34 home runs in those 14 years. He wasn’t great and was never considered for any major awards. On my baseball card, he was a San Francisco Giant. It was the way the S ornately snaked around and through the F on the front of his Giants’ cap that sealed the deal for me. SF was my team.

When we moved to central California and I discovered I could listen to every Giant game on the radio, I thought I was in heaven. My fandom love affair only deepened by the mesmerizing voices of the legendary broadcasters Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons. Night games went a bit too late for my elementary age bedtime, but a crystal radio with a headset and later transistor radios under my pillow solved that problem.

I loved listening to Russ and Lon, but my fourth grade mind was also perplexed. If they were such great Giant fans — and they certainly sounded like great fans — why wouldn’t they just report that the Giants were winning all the time. Why couldn’t they just tell me and all the other young Giant fans out there what we wanted to hear. Surely they could watch the game and even if the Giants weren’t winning, they could report that we were winning. We could go 162-0. Willie Mays could hit a home run every at-bat and Juan Marichal could strike every opposing batter out on three pitches. It would be great!

Of course, at some level I realized they couldn’t do that. Their journalistic integrity would not allow them to entertain such an absurd notion, but that didn’t stop me from wishing anyway.

I never really discussed that childhood desire to hear pleasant lies instead of harsh truth with anyone, but I’ve come to believe that had I started a “Please Lie to Me” club, there would have been plenty of applicants for membership. I am speaking of the leftist progressives of the Democrat party.

I am talking about the big pharmaceutical companies and government health agencies who hide data of excessive deaths, claiming their products are safe and effective. I am referring to the voices coming from medical schools who tell us that men they can breastfeed babies and the college-indoctrinated social justice warriors who tell us the meaning of words we’ve known from our childhood now means something completely different. I speak of modern “journalists” who now, in spite of reports and evidence to the contrary, tell us that the Emperor’s clothes are indeed breathtaking.

Those who listen uncritically to, and so easily believe, the lies remind me of a much uglier version of that elementary-aged me. Most worrisome is that caricature-like, ghoulishly ugly version of me seems to have enough resources at their disposal to bankroll pursuit of that 162-0 season.

John Adams, our second president and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wasn’t a fan of the Constitution for a very specific reason. He worried, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” and that “in a society riddled with vices, the various mechanisms created by the Constitution will not be able to function properly.” He was convinced that our democratic republican order would be eventually supplanted by corrupt forces into despotism.

John Milton shared that belief. “None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. License they mean when they cry liberty; For who loves that, must first be wise and good. The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.”

Too often, religion seeks to conform to a broken society by granting license instead of helping to heal our society by demonstrating restraint, sacrifice and charity. Once morality has no basis in meaning whatsoever and changes at the drop of a hat, the church has joined the educational institutions, the once-respected medical establishment, the fourth estate and politicians in claiming everything is moral and espousing any lunatic lie as truth, then we are through being us.

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