MountainMornings

Being a practitioner of brutal honesty is always difficult.

Take yesterday’s tale of the parsnip cranberry cake; I was worried because even though I’d dug up two pounds of parsnips, there wasn’t one cranberry to be found. Not fresh nor frozen. So I grabbed a bag of frozen acai berries – that was the first mistake because there were no berries, it was just juice for a smoothie.

I swirled the juice over the top of the cake batter and popped them in the oven hoping the acai would add the needed tart moisture. As I was assembling the three layers with yummy cream cheese icing, but without cranberries or cranberry sauce, Bob said, “It’s lopsided!”

Now granted, he was right. It was like the Tower of Pisa! So I pushed and I turned and for just one moment I thought I’d fixed it. But no, I’d baked a crooked cake. There was no denying it, the truth didn’t exactly set me free but it did leave me with hope. Maybe it would taste good?

My friend and neighbor who is known to deliver peaches dropped off an extra copy of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The cover story is timely, “Free Speech Will Save Our Democracy; the First Amendment in the age of disinformation,” by Emily Bazelon.

It’s an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. They think our formulations are simplistic — and especially inadequate for our era. Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes. But in the United States and other democracies, there is a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news and science. It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

Finally social media has started to add caveats to false and misleading claims but much of the damage has already been done. Just this morning Mr T said he hasn’t had a call with a reporter for the NYTimes in two years – when in fact just two months ago he spoke with Peter Baker for 40 minutes! Does he have dementia or is this a malicious strategy to create a fog of lies so that we the people never know what to believe?

Sure in China information is censored, but will our democracy survive the chaos of chronic disinformation? We have 15 days to vote.

Last night, I delivered my listing/tilting parsnip acai cake to the Bride and Groom’s front porch. I admitted my failure and was told the icing was delicious! And as we talked about the L’il Pumpkin’s upcoming birthday, I told him that lying to your parents will get him in more trouble than telling the truth, every time! And he said, “Mom has truth-telling eyes.” And I believed him!