Where Truth Goes to Die

May 25, 2023

Amanda Gorman, the young poet who wrote “The Hill We Climb” and also recited it at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, who is getting adoring and well-deserved coverage across mainstream media, brings a poignant reminder of the debt the country owes Joe Biden for his dignity and decency. Amanda is poised to experience the “banned in Boston” effect after her poem upset a woman in Florida who demanded it be taken from the school library, raising the significance of her poem to even greater heights during these dark times in American history.

One parent’s argument that Amanda’s sharing of her autobiographical truth in her poem with children infringes on her own parental right to shield her two young children from indoctrination won the day. A Florida grade school decided to pull “The Hill We Climb” from the eyes and ears of elementary students1. Here is a sample of the Amanda’s offending words:

On Tuesday, Gorman addressed the ban, in a statement posted to social media. "I'm gutted. Because of one parent's complaint, my inaugural poem, 'The Hill We Climb,' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida2," she wrote. Gorman explained how and why she came to write the poem in a post on Instagram:

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A “Truth Commission” as a legitimate political project is historically a government tool to uncover the factual truth of crimes against a people. The January 6th Committee is a recent example of such a commission. Amanda Gorman and the students deprived of her poem deserve a truth commission to investigate a crime against children’s right to think for themselves.

Truth commissions have a history of seeking truth. During the 60s and 70s the drive for justice inspired truth commissions in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil to find and tell the truth about thousands of innocents killed or tortured by military juntas. Amanda’s poem speaks of her ancestors who were held in slavery.

If the truth were established, documented, and communicated, so went the logic, the terror people kept bottled up in their souls might break like a fever, the truth could heal them and restore their faith in humanity, and they could find a path to a renewed world. Amanda’s poem was about reconciliation. She reveled in her good fortune to live in a country strong enough to own its crimes against human decency and change.

Fat chance these days that Amanda’s truth would survive the ire of white supremacists in Florida. If you can imagine that President Trump taught us anything—an enormous challenge for your imagination, I realize—it’s this: Even the most obvious truth can be distorted in the mouths of the malevolent. January 6th was “a beautiful day in America.” This blatant censorship of the truth by Simple obvious lying adds a new wrinkle to authoritarianism and to censorship.

The following words published well before the Trump Era remind us how slippery truth is becoming and ups the ante on defanging censorship of all kinds, silencing the truth in Amanda’s case and outright lying in Trump’s case (the following quote is Michael Ignatieff, 19963):

“In South Africa, Archbishop Tutu's Truth Commission is collecting testimony from the victims and perpetrators of apartheid. In Tutu's own words, the aim is 'the promotion of national unity and reconciliation'...'the healing of a traumatised, divided, wounded, polarised people'. Laudable aims but are they coherent? Look at the assumptions he makes: that a nation has one psyche, not many; that the truth is one, not many; that the truth is certain, not contestable; and that when it is known by all, it has the capacity to heal and reconcile. These are not so much assumptions of epistemology as articles of faith about human nature: the truth is one and if we know it, it will make us free.”

In the words of another poet, “people are crazy and times have changed” not for the better (B. Dylan, 2004). Assumptions of epistemology in 1996 were holding their own; today, judges untrained in medical science are making decisions about gynecological health issues for women legally made by the CDC. Judges are censoring MDs. Articles of faith about human nature are up for grabs in our political, economic, and educational realms where manipulation of the sort that got George Santos are protected while Amanda Gorman’s poem is silenced. The truth is still the truth, but freedom means never having to face the truth.

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Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle (1906) is in the Hall of Fame of banned books, being banned internationally, wrote a light-hearted piece on the upside of censorship—the banned in Boston effect—in the New Yorker in 1927. The Jungle, of course, was banned not so much because of its graphic depiction of the harsh working conditions of immigrants toiling in the meat packing industry, but because the likes of Senator Joseph MCarthy and his ilk, who despoiled the name “truth commission,” rejected its sympathetic perspective on socialism.

There’s a ton of money to be made if you can pen something that might set off the simple minded to ban your poem or book and explode in the media, wrote Upton Sinclair. There’s no better draw to a bookstore than an incensed mob bent on book burning or banning, irrespective of the fact that not one of them cracked the spine of the book in question, crying out that the thing is so obscene it must be locked away from children:

The banned in Boston effect could turn out to be the reason Amanda Gorman’s poem about a skinny black girl reciting her work at a Presidential inauguration may one day become required reading across the country.

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Ignatieff (1996) made the argument that truth, justice, and reconciliation are not logically linked, an argument well supported by the January 6th Committee. He pointed out that truth commissions see their goal to be reconciliation, but in fact though justice is logically dependent on truth, truth may or may not serve reconciliation. Some injustices are so grave they cannot be reconciled but must be punished.

In 2023 in the arena of race relations, the truth is that America has over centuries built a country on an unjust legal, economic, and political foundation. Justice for the slaves who cleared the land and worked the land of white supremacists, the land ripped violently and mercilessly from indigenous people who also deserve justice, awaits the acknowledgment of a truth which will produce reconciliation only following accountability.

Understanding and acknowledging truth can set the stage for accountability leading to reconciliation. Censorship of truth sets the stage for agony. In the area of politics, the truth is that President Trump conceived, planned, and executed an attempted take-over of the federal government. Reconciliation requires shunning and punishment of criminal behavior, especially if the criminal was the President. Ignatieff picks it up here in the reality of 1996:

“The War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is collecting evidence about atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. It is doing so not simply because such crimes against humanity must be punished - otherwise international humanitarian law means nothing - but also because establishing the truth about such crimes through the judicial process is held to be crucial to the eventual reconciliation of the people of the Balkans. In the African city of Arusha, a similar tribunal is collecting evidence about the genocide in Rwanda, believing likewise that truth, justice and reconciliation are indissolubly linked in the rebuilding of shattered societies.”

If the truth commission finds the truth but misjudges the link between reconciliation and accountability, the problem just gets worse. In many ways the United States today as its conservative white population grasps for comfortable solutions to its unique historical reality suffers from false reconciliation aided and abetted by censorship of the truth:

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The internet has become a hornet’s nest of issues around censorship. In 2010 a report presented food for thought about a geography of censorship4

Figure 1 depicts the United States and China as the greatest consumers of the Internet in the world. Figure 2 shows a reverse relationship between the United States and China vis a vis internet censorship.

In the United States freedom of speech is unfettered in the digital realm. How can it be that a lone parent in Miami-Dade County can censor the voice of a young poet telling the whole truth about her country’s history while a former President can go online and repeat lie after lie freely?

As Dylan sang in his song about a worried man with a worried mind, people are crazy and times are strange.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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