Friday, November 6, 2020

The clumsy fabrications

 "How do I know they are lying? Because it is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true."

-- Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear

We hold the methods of Sherlock Holmes in pretty high esteem in these Sherlockian parts. The man was a genius, who studied hard, kept a mental library of recognizable details, and performed feats of observation and deduction that seem beyond most of us . . . usually.

Yet this week, I don't think one particular method of Sherlock's is beyond most of us, the one he uses in the quote above. How does he spot a lie? Because it's so badly concocted that it just couldn't be true.

That has been a growing trend of the U.S. president over the past four years. Yes, I'm going "political" because reality isn't just an opinion, as much as some would like to deny facts as it suits them by dumping them in the "political" bucket. The man lies, again and again and again. Clumsy fabrications that anyone who is paying attention to the world about them knows are lies the minute they come out of his mouth.

It quit taking a Sherlock Holmes to spot that a long time ago.

His sycophants lie to him to keep him happy, he lies to keep his fans happy at their little fan-fests, and then his enablers lie to try to massage his lies into something closer to palatable plausibility. The circle of fiction just feeds itself, 'round and 'round it goes. It becomes very tiring to the rest of us, having to hear the clumsy fabrications day after day, to the point where the news has to just shut him off.

Before the last few years, it's hard to imagine a major network just shutting down a presidential speech just thirty seconds in, but here we are. Just that tired of the clumsy fabrications.

The loyal team players dutifully stand by him, for whatever reason. Many have just been trained to fear some other group so much they'll put up with incompetence, just to protect themselves from that group they're frightened of. There are other reasons, some more valid than others, some as nutty as a flat earther with a magic bean.  But, y'know, I'm writing a Sherlock Holmes blog here.

And you know what a Sherlock Holmes blog is about? That guy who had no time for "a clumsy fabrication." The guy who sought truth, honest, science-based, provable truth . . . it was his whole end goal, every time. Justice could be administered or not. Lives could be saved . . . or not. But at the end, always at the end, no matter what he could or could not do, was the truth. Even if Sherlock Holmes was just revealing the truth behind his own less-clumsy fabrication, as in "Dying Detective."

We need more Sherlock Holmes right now. And a lot less clumsy fabrications.

Because, damn, they get old fast.



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