Double Plus Ungood, or The Lies of Big Brother

There aren’t many moments that I remember discerning pain in my father’s voice. Listening to him recount the sad saga of Francis Gary Powers was one of them. In 1960 Powers piloted a U-2 spy plane across Soviet airspace. With a ceiling at 70,000 feet the plane was believed to be out of reach of Soviet air defenses. Despite this his plane was shot down, mostly intact and he reached ground safely, only to be taken prisoner. The sorrow in my father’s voice, however, wasn’t over what happened. The sorrow came when he explained that President Eisenhower told the American people that a weather plane had accidentally flown off course and crashed with no survivors. Not long after, Khrushchev produced Powers and the spy plane for all to see. It was, to my father, the first time our government had been caught in an undeniable lie. It broke his innocence.

Lying is bad, heartbreaking, conducive to crushing the faith of the trusting. There is shame and embarrassment as well. What is worse, however, is when lies are told with such a brazen and callous spirit in which everyone knows it’s a lie. The rotting cynicism of a government that doesn’t expect to be believed, only obeyed brings to mind the words George Orwell penned in 1984– If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever.

That time is here, unmasked with the shameless hypocrisy of various state and local governments who have told us we must not, because of the health risks, congregate, unless we are remembering the death of a civil rights icon. We must not gather in large numbers, unless we are protesting the death of George Floyd. There has been no attempt to nuance or spin this reality, no verbal two-step or rhetorical misdirection. It’s all been out there, in the open. “Yes, we said it is not safe for you to gather. But if the motive for the gathering is this favored political expression or that, then it is safe.” Absolutely shameless.

There is one thing sadder still. That we just accept this. Please don’t misunderstand. The issue isn’t COVID or quarantines. The issue isn’t the memorial services or the protests. The issue isn’t debates on how deadly the illness or how useful social distancing is. The issue is that the government has now reached a place where they don’t even pretend to have a rational defense of what they say, and that we move along as if we have not just crossed a Rubicon. They painted this on the side of the barn- “All group meetings are equal” and then, when it suited them, added, “but some are more equal than others.” And we just keep chewing our cud.

I don’t have a solution. I can’t begin to imagine how to even get back to that better place and time where they bothered to wrap a veil of plausibility around their lies. I don’t know how to teach us to once again blush in the face of such shame. All I can do is cling to this glorious truth, that the real government, the one with all the power, is well beyond the reach of surface to air missiles, and that He has never and will never lie. Maranatha Lord Jesus.