I grew up in a small town where no one ever locked their doors. No matter that when we came home, all our stuff was gone—we still never locked our doors.
My parents, like pretty much all the adults in my town, were easily hoodwinked. I remember one night they returned from a stirring lecture by an aspiring politician by the name of Douglas Stringfellow. Stringfellow, a Republican who went on to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, mesmerized his audiences with riveting accounts of his service during World War Two, including the time he embarked on a top secret mission to rescue an atomic physicist, Otto Hahn, from behind enemy lines. Captured by the Germans, Stringfellow had been brutally tortured in Belsen Prison, which caused him to become a paraplegic; nonetheless, he somehow managed to escape.
Dwight David Eisenhower was also a war hero, except that—unlike Stringfellow—Ike’s back story was basically true. Nevertheless, we all liked Ike. Unlike his political rival, Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower wasn’t an “egghead.” Those of us enrolled at Warren G. Harding Elementary—named in honor of one of the crookedest presidents ever—disliked eggheads. Smart kids just made the rest of us look stupid, which in fact we were.
Eventually I became a young man and was ordained an “elder” in my local church at the tender age of nineteen. As an elder, I was obliged to join a quorum of other elders each Sunday morning, at which time we listened to tape recorded sermons by a prominent church leader by the name of Paul H. Dunn. Like Stringfellow, Dunn styled himself a combat veteran, once finding himself sharing a foxhole with a startled Japanese infantryman. But instead of shooting the guy, Dunn converted him to Mormonism. Baptism under fire, so to speak.
Well, it turns out that Paul Dunn, like Douglas Stringfellow, was a shameless fabulist. But here’s the thing: in small towns across America, citizens have become accustomed to wallowing in “alternative facts.” It’s what comes from paying too much attention to those in positions of authority, when you stop looking around and only look up.