Nadine

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

—Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

A few months ago I read a book recommended by a friend about the raid on Dresden in February of 1945. The attack was of particular interest to me because my grandfather flew in that one, described to me as a boy the smoke reaching his formation nearly 30,000 feet up as the 379th Bomb Group arrived to "shake the rubble" of a city already mostly flattened by that time.

The most interesting part of the book, at least to me, involved the German air defense command trying to divine where a raid might be headed on any given day or night. They'd watch the swarm of blips on the radar take off and cross the English Channel, cross France or the Low Countries, and eventually cross the Rhine. Then the slightest divergence in course might provide a clue as to the target--were they headed to Mariensburg? To Berlin? The goal was to give the folks on the ground as much time as possible to seek shelter before the bombs started raining on their neighborhoods.

We on the Gulf Coast get to live some of that, in slow motion, during hurricane season. We see the swirl of red on the radar in the western Caribbean or over the Yucatan, and within a day or two here come the spaghetti models, and then the cone, and then the winds and rain and flooding that might mess up your yard a little, or destroy your community. It's a fraught few weeks, during which I start the morning with the NHC discussion page just as I might read the Times any other time of year.

Last night as we felt a sort of guilty relief that Wyldswood dodged a bullet with Milton, I saw a Facebook post from an otherwise sane friend, supposedly reposted from a meteorologist, showing the anticipated path of Hurricane Nadine. It was forecast to arrive in the Big Bend six days from now, as a Cat 2. I mentioned it to Peg as she fixed supper, and we cursed and talked about just putting a for sale sign in the yard outside the wreckage and moving on with our lives. Four hurricanes in fourteen months is simply too much.

There was just one problem: the whole report was fake.

The news of the hoax turned despair into rage. Who, who is a big enough asshole after all we've been through to do something like this? Who benefits from this fake reality?

The same folks who created the fake girl and puppy photo, supposedly taken in North Carolina after Helene, in an attempt to discredit our federal government and its leadership.

I don't think it's too much to say that, at this point, we're at war with ourselves. The country lives in two different alternative realities, and, as the weary author of this piece in the Atlantic notes, one in which one end of the political spectrum freely acknowledges they don't care if it's a lie, so long as it's a useful lie.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The+Atlantic+AM

Sorry the article is behind a firewall. You really ought to subscribe to the Atlantic. It's good for your brain.

Which I guess explains why Trump's pulling even, or ahead, in so many polls lately. The greatest foreign misinformation plot in our history is bearing fruit, funded by wannabe tech oligarchs whose nihilistic goal is simply to rule over a disoriented population that can't tell a real hurricane from a fake.

Until, of course, it tears through your hometown.

I consider myself slightly above-average at filtering BS. Legal training helps with that, at least a little. If I'm snookered, and for a few hours I was, I'm not optimistic about where all this is heading for the rest of the country. Peg's optimistic that our citizenry is too lazy and out of shape to start shooting at each other. I'm not so sure, now that we live in two different intellectual ecosystems with little in the way of shared reality.

"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” So said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a scholar and public servant of the first order. I reckon it turns out Danny was wrong. We'll just have to see how that goes . . .