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Wars of words

In the days after the presidential inauguration, there was a lot of talk about "war." Man-talk. You know how they are when they get together, telling battle stories and doing mental pushups to make themselves feel more heroically manly.

But it is striking that these war stories of 2017 are not of the usual genre. Instead, they are tales of wars against the press, wars over the number of Americans on the streets of Washington during the inauguration and, perhaps most important, wars over what is true and what could be, or would be or should be.

It is always instructive to see men in power squabble about war, especially when it is these same men who have stayed up nights figuring out how to avoid offering their humble bodies to fight in those selfsame wars.

But let's focus on today's curious new wars - language wars, grammar wars, moral wars - which have already spawned a most strange, and often frightening, new language. Write these phrases down: Post-truth society. Beyond honesty. Post-fact. Alternative facts. Truthful hyperbole. Different concepts of reality. (George Orwell, are you listening?)

This war starts with the new president declaring robustly at the CIA headquarters last weekend that he had a "running war with the media." Journalists are the "most dishonest people" he knows, which is saying quite a bit when one looks at his financier friends. (And don't you just love all these guys who never fought a day in their lives declaring "war" on the media?)

Now, I can tell you, after spending 50 years covering foreign countries, that if the president thinks this will stop news from getting out, he is a very foolhardy warrior, indeed.

I covered the "post-truth" Soviet Union, the "beyond-honesty" Burma and the "alternative fact" Iraq and, even in those sorry places, there were always ways to get news. There are always people who want to talk, places to go to file a report more-or-less safely and sources who will offer you sane interpretations. It just takes more work, and you're always willing to work like a banshee when people make you mad.

Actually, in those five decades, I have seen journalists who are foolish, who puff themselves up far beyond reason and who don't always get it right; but I have never seen any who were flagrantly dishonest. During the campaign, too many abused Donald Trump because they frankly didn't like him (at the same time, at least on television, giving candidate Trump everything he asked for).

Too many in the media missed the Trump followers, the president's forgotten men and women. Let's not do that again!

But how about the average citizen - the Americans who won't give a few coins for a good newspaper that works doggedly to tell the daily stories of our lives? Aren't they guilty, too, of not following the responsible press and, instead, of gluing themselves to ever-more-irresponsible cable TV and social media, empowering them?

Finally, lest President Trump believe his own advertisements - i.e., that truth somehow does not matter - I suggest someone brief him on: (1) how President Nixon is remembered for a two-bit break-in that would embarrass a First Ward alderman in Chicago, or (2) how George W. will forever be tarnished by his lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

On the other hand, there is, and should be, deep and reasonable concern among serious people about how a rising populism in America, Europe or elsewhere is endangering truth. Truth, they are saying, could lose.

But the good thing is that it is all out in the open, and that every move and act of this administration - and any administration - will be meticulously dissected. Despite everything, we are not a banana republic, we are not a failed state, and we are not a nation without strong moral and intellectual fiber underneath the often silly surface.

And we are not alone. The Washington Post recently reported that in the Czech Republic, a "SWAT team for truth," a newly formed government unit, has been "charged with scouring the internet and social media, fact-checking, then flagging false reports to the public." Czechs, after all, had enough of "relative truths" in their years under the Soviet yoke. (Germany and Finland are also setting up similar operations, according to the Post.)

Meanwhile, another curiosity lies in the fact that, in all this talk and travail about "wars," there is almost no mention of the real wars America is so foolishly involved in - and by almost all accounts, is losing or bogged down in. Maybe someday those in the Oval Office will actually mention the devastation being abetted by the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.

Then again, maybe they won't. After all, they are very busy. They have their own wars to fight.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2017, Universal

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