By David K. Shipler
A man
walked into a medical clinic and asked for an eye and ear doctor.
“We don’t
have an eye and ear doctor,” said the nurse. “We have an eye doctor. And we
have an ear doctor.”
“Not
good enough,” the man insisted. “I need an eye and ear doctor.”
“Why?”
“Because
I keep hearing one thing and seeing another.”
So went
one of the myriad jokes that kept Russians mentally afloat under communism in
the Soviet Union, where they were bathed in the good-news propaganda of a government
adept at concealing problems—except for problems that citizens could see with
their own eyes.
I confess
to a limited imagination back then, in the late 1970s: I never conceived of
Soviet jokes being applicable to the United States one day. But here we are,
with a president who has lied or exaggerated some 22,000 times, according to a
running tally by Washington Post
fact-checkers. And thousands of his supporters at rallies cheer his fabulations.
“Just
remember,” Trump told
an audience last summer, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not
what’s happening.”
What a relief. COVID-19 cases seemed
to be spiking until Trump reassured a rally that the country was “turning a
corner” in the pandemic and his son, Donald Jr. declared that deaths were down
to “almost nothing” the day they hit 1,000. Trump’s White House recently listed
“Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic” first among his accomplishments in science and
technology.
At rallies last week, Trump covered
his failure to get Mexico to pay for his border wall by claiming that it’s
happening. In Sanford, Florida on Monday: “And by the way, Mexico is paying.
They hate to say it: Mexico is paying for it.” In Johnstown, Pennsylvania on
Tuesday: “And Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way. You know that. I've
been saying it. They hate to hear that. But they're paying.” In Des Moines,
Iowa the next day: “And as I said, Mexico is paying for the wall.” The eye and
ear doctors must be doing a booming business.
I keep wishing a reporter would ask
Trump whether, when he tells a lie, he realizes that he’s lying or thinks that
he’s telling the truth. I wished Biden had asked him that in the last debate.
It doesn’t take much editing to put
Trump into some of those old jokes. In one favorite of politically irreverent
Russians, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are on the train to communism when it
grinds to a halt. When it does not move again, Stalin orders the crew taken out
and shot. That done, the train still doesn’t go. So Khrushchev orders the crew
rehabilitated posthumously. Still, the train doesn’t move. So Stalin and
Khrushchev turn to Brezhnev. He pulls down the shades and says, “Now let’s
pretend the train is moving.”
As Peter Baker writes in The New York Times, “Born amid made-up crowd size claims and ‘alternative facts,’ the Trump presidency has been a factory of
falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and
brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and
defied historical analogy.” The same was true in the Soviet Union, except that
in the communist dictatorship, joke-telling needed a sanctuary, often around
the kitchen table, secure among trusted family and friends.
We have not come to that in the
United States, mercifully, where the safety valves of humor are very public, and
the release of laughter spews out daily from professional comedians and amateur
Americans alike. Still, it’s distressing how smoothly Trump’s dissembling can
be slid into Russians’ lampoons of their Soviet government’s pompous spins into
unreality. Let’s end with this one:
At a medical conference, three
doctors compared notes.
“I treated a patient for pneumonia,
and he died of cancer,” confessed a physician from France.
“That’s funny,” admitted an
American. “I treated a patient for cancer, and he died of pneumonia.”
The two looked expectantly at their
Russian colleague, who straightened, puffed out his chest defensively, and
declared: “Gentlemen, when we treat a patient for a disease, he dies of that
disease!”
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