By Doug Pugh
Somewhere in my travels, through the definitions of words and the characterizations of men’s actions, obscenity became defined in terms of a comparison: something decent, valued, and true, contrasted with something base, corrupt, and false.
Always, a contrast was integral to a definition of obscenity. Today, that comparison contrasts decency and truth with sleaze and unmitigated lies.
Earnest Hemingway, speaking of the debacle that was World War I, wrote about obscenity in his novel “A Farewell to Arms.”
“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory — abstract words such as glory, courage, or hallowed — were all obscene.”
Obscene, not because of the men who died there, but rather because of those who led them into a lie.
There are lies we recognize, lies we are fooled by, and lies we know as lies but choose to ignore — falsities juxtaposed on truths — obscenities. If we fail to call them what they are, they will defile us as much as they do those who utter them.
Lies are allowing our waters to be polluted, our air to be fouled, our climate compromised, the respect due our courts diminished, our politics corrupted, and our prejudices and intolerances to descend to hatreds, then to violence against each other.
All this is based on a stupidity we should recognize, as we have seen it all before, a stupidity that Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts described so well:
“It’s the stupid of cold hearts and closed minds. It’s mean stupid, ugly stupid, the stupid of those whose appeal is always to that which is most base, most smug, most self-satisfied. It’s a frightening, sickening, eternal kind of stupid.”
It’s a kind of stupid we face today.
With a name like mine, I’ve known name-calling, but it stopped for me around the first grade. Not so for our soldiers — they have been called “suckers and losers.”
Making fun of people whose injuries or disabilities are apparent was never in vogue, but they are barred from military parades.
Professional journalists, whose job is to convey accurate information, to ask the hard questions, and make the probing inquiries, are characterized as purveyors of “Fake News” and are barred from the Pentagon and other press briefings.
Investigative photographers at the Pentagon are barred from press briefings because they have taken “unflattering pictures.”
Our president has made baseless assertions about elections, casting unsubstantiated doubt on results that have been validated time and time again.
On Sept. 24, 2020, the FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate: “We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud in a major election, whether by mail or otherwise.”
Many others have echoed this conclusion, and no substantial fraud has been found in any contemporary national or statewide election.
Elaine Kamarck, writing in the Oct. 28, 2024 edition of Brookings, the publication of The Brookings Institution, discusses the results of a voter fraud investigation conducted by The Heritage Foundation. Here’s what they found:
Elections in seven states were looked at: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
I’ll take my home state of Michigan first: They looked back 17 years at 26 midterm, presidential, or special elections in which 64,520,604 ballots had been cast. The number of fraudulent ballots discovered was 19. A fraud rate of 0.0000294%.
In North Carolina, they looked back 38 years at 39 such elections — 81,677,000 votes were cast, of which 58 were determined to be fraudulent, an error rate of 0.0000710%.
The highest fraud rate was in Nevada, where over a period of 13 years in 14 such elections, a total of 8,506,824 ballots were cast. Only eight cases of fraud were found, an error rate of .0000940%.
Voter fraud has always been a serious concern, which is why there are so many protections built into the system to prevent it. In all elections, both Democrats and Republicans have teams of lawyers and other observers in counting rooms, where the counting is done openly using a sophisticated system operated by experienced people, many of whom are our neighbors.
As the above study and others repeatedly show, it’s a system that works. To say our elections produce fraudulent results is, simply, a lie.
Too many people have served, fought, and died for this country to allow a lie to destroy it. That would be mean, base, ugly, and stupid.
It would be an obscenity.
Doug Pugh is a retired judge from northern Michigan. He and his wife are wintering on Fripp Island and are pleased to be there. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.