This year facts didn’t matter in the voting booth,
And to parse fact from fiction would take a sleuth.
You’ve got your facts, I’ve got mine,
So don’t even try to change my mind,
For we’ve entered and era (not an epoch, I hope) of the post-truth.
“What people believe prevails over the truth.”
— Sophocles, from “Sons of Aleus”
Following Barack Obama’s election as president, there was talk about how the nation had entered a post-racial era, which proved not to be true. Following Donald Trump’s election as president, we have entered a post-truth era, and there’s little doubt about that fact.
We now have slid from “truthiness,” Stephen Colbert’s funny little noun that means “the quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence or the like,” a short distance down a very slippery slope to “post-truth.” The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.
Its selection follows June’s Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election.
<2>— Playbook
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
