We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.
There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”
The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.
We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true. You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible. During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries.
Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation. A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure. The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading. I was relieved.
A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have. There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy. As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up. Here’s what the device looks like:
I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans. The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low. I needed to talk to my doctor. The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor. My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.
This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response. Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon. It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question. It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.
It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk. There aren’t multiple sides to this story. If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story. You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is. It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.
Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.
You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.
Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.
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