Let's be honest 1: rhetoric (You need a diaper change)

To digest popular political commentary these days: Lies, lies, everywhere lies. Obama lied. Clinton was "lying Hillary." Trump with his 70% dishonesty rating is of course Mr. Mendacity. Oh but the lamestream media gave him the rating, and who can believe them? They lie all the time.

What's going on? Where's the truth in any of this? Where's the truth anywhere?

The problem is that our Greco-Roman heritage hardwires all of us to lie.

Rhetoric is nothing more than a grownup version of an infant crying. The baby, by wailing, sends the message, "I am dying. If you don't come right away, I will expire and you'll be saddled with a ton of guilt for the rest of your life. I am dying. Come now and save my life." The adult responds, finding only a wakeful child squirming in a poop-filled diaper. But does the adult learn from this that there is probably no emergency when the baby cries? No. The next time--every time--it's life or death.

Rhetoric is a highly evolved, systematized linguistic way of saying "Get in here, adult, and change my diaper." The Greeks discovered it. They also discovered heliocentrism and the atom, but these were ditched for having an excess of truth about them. Rhetoric, however, they kept and developed into a blazing ball of weaponized dishonesty, aka "Greek Fire." The recipe was thought to have been lost, but WikiLeaks/KGB, in a cyber-archeological coup, managed to recover it in an underground DNC cistern in Istanbul.

According to one theory, the Egyptians were too honest to develop rhetoric. The Greeks, on the other hand, included gods in their pantheon the scale of whose lies put Donald Trump to shame. At least as far as I know, Trump has not transformed himself into a swan in order to have sex with a beauty contestant, whereas one Greek god did this so routinely--without provoking any constitutional crises and, further, with much, much higher ratings than Celebrity Apprentice can dream of--that he climbed all the way to the top of Mt. Olympus without a lobbyist--though not without a (g)rope haha.

What this meant of course is that, hey, yeah, the gods must be crazy, but right on! And thus--pulled, like Athena, straight from the, unlike Athena, mendacious loins of Zeus--were born theatre, adversarial disputation, selling, marketing, and all manner of bull-riding, which quickly (what's 2.25 centuries in the eternal scheme?) morphed into 7.481 billion people--most of them able to speak and even including Egyptians--squalling for a diaper change like an Olympian in rut.

So you have to feel sorry for the heliocentric and atomistic scientists who want to convince us that it's the earth that needs a diaper change, but they use graphs and paper titles like "The Sensitivity of Fixed Data Masks in Global-Mean Diurnal Temperature Ranges." I mean, c'mon! Did they learn nothing from the KGB/WikiLeaks discovery of Alternative Intelligence on planet (T)rump? Who do they think they are, Egyptians?

Next up: Let's Be Honest 2: Labels. Or how can a proto-fascist neanderthal like you love a progressive superhero like Jesus Christ/Richard Nixon/Groucho Marx?