Gaslight

Just the facts, ma'am.

I’ve never seen the film, but today I read the screenplay for Gaslight, the 1944 George Cukor film starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. I wanted to know from where the term “gaslighting” originated. What a story…

A young girl’s aunt is murdered. Years later, Paula (the girl, now grown) brings her new husband to the home she shared with her aunt. Her whirlwind romance quickly grows sour when her husband starts asking why things she claims she hasn’t touched go missing and people she claims she hasn’t met know her. Her servants say they can’t hear the strange footsteps overhead nor notice the change in the brightness of the gaslight on the wall. 

Soon Paula cannot trust anything she sees or thinks or remembers. Her husband tells her  she is insane. That nothing is as it seems to her. And she begins to believe him… until an officer from Scotland Yard bursts through the door and reveals the truth about her husband.

Imagine not being able to trust the facts in front of your eyes? Imagine seeing or hearing something perfectly clearly only to have someone in a position of authority tell you it isn’t so? What you see and hear is not what’s happening?  This is gaslighting.

I have always had a deep interest in politics, but I feel like the political world has been gaslighting me for decades.

I was thinking it started in 2015, but then I realized it was much earlier than that. The more I go through my memories, the earlier the examples I can find. 

There was Anita Hill taking a polygraph that supported her claims of sexual harassment and yet Congress believed Clarence Thomas when he shouted it was just a liberal conspiracy to keep him down. 

In 2002, I thought I’d fallen asleep and lost a few months because I couldn’t understand how we’d gone from a war in Afghanistan to talking about a war in Iraq. I felt like I’d missed some important event.

In 2007, a relative posted memes on my Facebook page about how Barack Obama was killing babies. And another posted how Democrats' support for gun control was the same as Nazis pushing Jews into gas chambers. Then, of course, birtherism. 

It wasn’t always as blatant as it is now, but it was like they were testing it out - seeing how far they could push until at last they realized no one would stop them from creating their own version of reality.

It got really bad.  In the last decade, facts have become irrelevant. Or if acknowledged and inconvenient, simply ignored and dismissed. We are told in an Orwellian fashion to accept “alternative facts.” And accept them - in fact, champion them - millions of Americans do.

• Trump won the popular vote in 2016

• Trump’s inauguration was bigger 

• Hillary Clinton was at the heart of a paedophile ring - Pizzagate

• Good people on both sides…

• The greatest economy in the history of the world (that any Republican economy is better than a Democrats) 

• The migrant invasion on the southern border

• The “perfect” call

• The climate change hoax

• Rounding the corner on the pandemic

• Trump won the 2020 election (if only Raffensperger would give him 11800 votes, which is totally okay since he was just frustrated when he said that)

Wrote Orwell, “reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else ….Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” As the party says, 2+2=5.

In 2016, when I thought I was still fighting the good fight by engaging with people on social media, I was told by acquaintances that I don’t know how to use the Internet… that I’m a fool for believing the media. That I need to see the real websites where they tell you the truth. Only to be shown obvious click-bate with no basis in reality. 

How do you argue with that? How do you convince people that they haven’t uncovered x-files, but rather often foreign-run fictions intended to manipulate and control their mind - like a cult brainwashing its members?

When the guy in charge takes actual footage of protests happening at that moment on his watch and claims “this is what will happen if my opponent is elected” - and people fail to see the irony… how do you fight that?

What do you do when one side has perfected the strategy that invents a crisis, talks about the crisis, convinces people a crisis has taken place and insists on investigating the crisis despite there being incontrovertible evidence to the contrary? “Benghazi” “But her emails” “The election was stolen.” (And for good measure, as a longtime resident of the UK, I shall add: £350 million for the NHS.) 

It’s as though life has become GasLight meets 1984 in a perpetual Groundhog Day. 

And the true evil genius is that one side has convinced themselves and their supporters that their opposition are actually the guilty parties! They project their guilt onto their “enemies.” If they haven’t won, they claim it can only be because their opponents cheated. They accept no world in which their opponents have legitimate support. 

(It’s okay for Republicans to call for rebellion after losing an election by 8 million votes and the electoral college but Democrats must play nice when twice in twenty years their candidates win significantly more votes, yet are denied office. And god forbid anyone question the arcane system developed by tired slave owners to protect minority rule. Because nothing 234 years old could possibly need improving.)

Beyond voting, what can an average citizen do? Without a megaphone or platform, without any means of reaching the people perpetrating these betrayals on our democracy? How do we act responsibly? How do we hold anyone to account? (This isn’t rhetorical… I’m asking!)

The day ticks on… The run-off election in Georgia is well underway. It’s like an incredibly tense Hollywood blockbuster. The media declares that Pelosi’s House majority is too small to be relevant. That Biden’s administration will have no power. The political future of America hangs in the balance and depends upon two Senate races in a traditionally Republican state.

This is too much tension for me. 

I want to be engaged and I want to be inclusive… but a Trump supporter recently asked me why we can’t agree to disagree? I can do so on political questions like whether we should tax more to pay for infrastructure or cut taxes as a stimulus. But the problem is that I can’t agree to disagree on what facts are. And that is what seems to be at issue.

I need facts to be universally acknowledged and accepted. I need the rulebook to apply equally to everyone. Is that asking too much?

In the final act of this crazy era, I need the officer from Scotland Yard to burst through the door and reveal incontrovertibly that 81,283,485 is bigger than 74,223,744 and all those votes are facts. 

Hey Trump Era: on your way out, please turn the gaslight off… 

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