Reality
About a decade ago, a documentary I produced on how Iowa journalists covered war was about to premiere…and we selected the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown for the premiere , in front of an audience of veterans and their families.
During the reception afterwards, one of the staff came up and said that one of the veterans wanted to meet me and share some stories. I was happy to have the meeting, because there’s nothing better than hearing first-hand accounts from people who were there, whatever the situation is.
But she made a point of noting that I should not believe everything the veteran would tell me. She said he had a stellar war record, but the more he was at the home and talked with others, the more he sort of adopted their stories as having happened to him. He wasn’t lying, he had just come to believe that the story in question had happened to him.
We sat and talked for a while, and it quickly became obvious what they meant. It was physically impossible for all the stories he told me to be true, because some happened at the same time but in different continents. But you could tell that he believed it all, and he told the stories quite well.
I thought about that not long ago when the current president yet again embellished his background to be in concert with his surroundings—talking about his time driving a semi when with a group of truckers, saying he attended a certain college that he actually didn’t when with students from historically black colleges and universities—there’s a full list. Biden says he was arrested when trying to see Nelson Mandela in a South African prison, saying his son died in combat when it was actually later from cancer…you know the stories.
Rather than discounting it as “just Joe being Joe” or hammering Biden for being a congenital liar…I really think it’s like the older veteran I met in Marshalltown. Each time he tells one of these odd stories, I really think Biden believes what he is saying. And that’s perhaps far more tragic—and dangerous—than if it was part of an orchestrated scheme to deceive.
