We Really Can't Handle The Truth
Advertising, Government, and Media Narratives Have Been False For Decades, But Inexplicably, We Rarely Question Their Validity.
Way back in the day, when Stegasaurus roamed, I would arrive home from school, flip on the television, and watch the lazy parade of late afternoon programming that helped housewives allegedly pass the time between breaks in the hard and underappreciated work of maintaining home and family.
Wages were good enough in the early to mid-60s that a one-income household could sustain a family, so, being a stay-at-home Mom was entirely feasible, something that’s entirely rare, or literally impossible today.
There were basically two types of programming at that time: Soap Operas in the early afternoon and Game Shows in the late afternoon. The Game Shows of that era were a bit more civilized and intellectual, panelists were often chosen from a pool of authors, writers, or intelligentsia of the era. Those shows bore no resemblance to over-the-top, carnival atmosphere extravaganzas, driven by consumer frenzy and large doses of greed, like “Let’s Make A Deal”. That was to come later to boost ratings. Perhaps dumber television meant better ad revenue.
Soap Operas, as most people know, were melodramatic, serial dramas, designed for intense concentration, which created a captive audience for marketing. They got their name because they began on Radio, before the advent of television, and were frequently sponsored by corporations that made laundry or bath soap. The products were specifically marketed to the “housewife” of that respective era. Dinosaurs roaming, remember?
Locked in the hypnotic spell that could only be uniquely induced by television, my Grandmother, and Mother, would “Shush” and “Shsssh” noisy children in order to keep up with their “stories”. Most people today are at least familiar with long-running Soaps like “General Hospital”, and “As The World Turns”.
(True Confession: I had an early childhood traumatic incident, a weird, terrifying first intersection with TV violence. My mother was watching a soap called “The Edge Of Night”. I sat beside her as she was watching, when, for some reason, maybe a phone call, she left the room, (phones were tied to locations back then, not portable) and I sat alone watching a scene unfold where a violent murder took place.
A woman (who could possibly have been named “Eve”, but don’t hold me to that) violently and repeatedly stabbed her lover with a pair of household scissors in the neck and back. I was an innocent kid and I had no idea about sex, its complications, or marital affairs, and was way too young to understand, but certainly, it was my first shocking introduction to the depravity of human behavior, courtesy of network television. In broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon.
The actor playing the male murder victim, screaming in pain and terror and agony, was pulling out all the stops. I was terrified watching this and started crying. Mom came running back to see what was wrong. I told her that someone was being murdered on live TV and no one was helping the victim. She hugged me, and reassuringly told me that none of what I was seeing was real, it was all fake and wasn’t really happening, despite seeing it all unfold in front of me.
Suspension of disbelief in full effect. I was less convinced. It wasn’t “true” that what I was seeing was “real” yet, my senses told me differently.
Through the miracle of Google, it turns out I was right about “Eve”. “Beth Anderson spotted Malcolm and Eve going into a cheap motel and told Cookie. Cookie confronted Malcolm, who admitted that he was having an affair with Eve. After a violent argument, Cookie left. A drunken Malcolm called Eve and told her he had something very important to tell her. Eve was stunned by news of Malcolm's secret marriage. When Malcolm insisted they end their affair because he truly loved Cookie, Eve went insane with jealousy and stabbed him in the back with a pair of Cookie's scissors.”)
One game show that ran after “The Edge Of Night” was broadcast on CBS Television, it was called “To Tell The Truth”.
The premise of “To Tell The Truth” was that a famous guest, whose name was largely recognizable, but not their face, was “hiding” among a group of three people. Two of those people were “imposters” lying about who, and what they were, only one was the “real” persona. Bud Collier was the smiling, genial host, who I remember most notably as wearing bow ties so large that they looked like airplane propellors. It’s funny what sticks in your consciousness after many years.
The three would stand in silhouette, then, an announcer dramatically intoned, as each person was individually spotlighted, “What Is Your Name Please?”. Each person would, of course, say THEY were the REAL persona. The three would then be seated and grilled by a panel of guests that would, through a series of timed interrogations, try to determine who was real, and who was the imposter. After the panel of interrogators revealed to the audience who their best guess was, Collier would intone, as in this example: “Will The Real Dr. Suess Please Stand Up!”
You may have noticed the name “GERITOL” prominently displayed in front of both the panelists and the host’s desk. GERITOL was an alleged tonic that was marketed to an aging population as a cure for “Tired Blood “, “Iron Poor Blood”, “Tiredness”, “Run Down Feeling”, and “Nervousness” or “Irritability”.
Ironic then, that a show that purported to be searching for “Truth”, even if it was obviously in a non-serious, light-hearted way, where truth is a game with no consequence, would repeat claims GERITOL made that it would cure “tiredness” across the board, which wasn’t true.
To be fair to the late Bud Collier and TTTT, everyone from Ted Mack, who hosted an immensely popular amateur talent hunt, and Lawrence Welk, who dominated the ratings on his weekly variety show on ABC, pimped GERITOL. The immense power of the three major broadcast networks via the medium of television is hard to imagine in 2022, where we have multiple media and social media platforms. They effectively sold GERITOL to a public, that had, to some degree, mutually agreed to suspend disbelief and embraced being lied to. GERITOL was just one step removed from the traveling carnivals of the 19th Century, sold by barkers from the back of buckboard wagons.
In April of 1970, after a decade or more of false claims made in advertising by the manufacturer, J.B. Williams Company, GERITOL was successfully sued by the watchdog agency of the Federal Government, the Federal Trade Administration, for 1,000,000 dollars. The charge was deceptive advertising. Specifically:
“The F.T.C. order prohibited Geritol from making any advertisement “which represents directly or by implication that the preparation is a generally effective remedy for tiredness, loss of strength, run-down feeling, nervousness or irritability.”
Many of the commercials show Ted Mack defining “tired blood” as iron deficiency anemia. The F.T.C. does not challenge Geritol's or Fem Iron's effectiveness against that.
But it asserts that the great majority of people who experience tiredness symptoms do not suffer from iron deficiency anemia, and the F.T.C. wants Geritol to make that clear in its advertisements”.
Hopefully not to overemphasize a point, but GERITOL, along with the phrase “Iron Poor Blood” was so effectively marketed that it was part of the lexicon of the day, ingrained like a permanent tattoo on the mind. GERITOL didn’t specifically hurt anyone that used it, it was mostly liquified vitamins and iron. But it wasn’t a miracle cure for anyone who was tired. That was a lie.
Yet, that wasn’t the end for J.B. Williams or GERITOL. Lawrence Welk continued to sponsor GERITOL, and they remained a sponsor even when the show was in syndication. The Lawrence Welk show had solid ratings but was taken off the air, due to the fact that ABC television wanted to seek out younger audiences and products to market towards.
Teenagers were not going to be buying GERITOL. Greg and Marsha Brady, soon-to-be superstars on ABC, didn’t have “Iron Poor Blood”. Life moved on to a younger market.
One of the most riveting films of the past decades, for me, was “A Few Good Men”. Tom Cruise, as Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a Lawyer attached to the Navy JAG Corps, takes on not only an intimidating legal defense of Marines who are on trial for murder but is forced to confront what is horrifyingly true in the persona of Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan R. Jessup.
In the dramatic climax to a scene where Kaffee demands to know if physical abuse and psychological intimidation (“Code Red”) is a policy of this division of Marines, Jessup asks Kaffee what he REALLY wants out of the interrogation, to which Kaffee responds “I WANT THE TRUTH!” Jessup leans forward, and in one of the most terrifying and intimidating moments ever committed to film, barks “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
Every time I look at the narratives we are living under today, I think of Jessup screaming that line. The level at which people ignore and reject the reality around them, and embrace false narratives, is the most intimidating aspect of being hopeful for the future.
Without truth, or at least accuracy in information, we can’t possibly integrate healthy psychology into our day-to-day lives. It would appear in the technological interconnected age of 2022, we can’t handle the truth. There is no agreed-upon consensus reality. We argue on social media about what should be easy, and obvious enough to agree on.
I live in Florida, and it’s well documented that the lack of COVID response from Governor Ron DeSantis precludes any empathy or embrace of what is true. DeSantis can’t “handle the truth” so he weaves a narrative that is inconsistent, dangerous, and has resulted in the deaths of over 73,000 Floridians. He is anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-masking, and literally has deployed the full force of very expensive law firms, representing the state of Florida, to challenge reality. To DeSantis, COVID is “Theater” and its spread and devastating effects are largely inconsequential. He literally makes it up as he goes along, constructing a personal narrative based on lies that suit his agenda to control the narrative.
Sadly, incredibly, and inexplicably, Ron DeSantis's denial of COVID has spread from the State level in Florida to the Federal level of the US and most Western governments. We are supposed to embrace a completely false narrative that says in essence: Go about your lives, drop your masks, get back to work, and head back to the office. Declare victory over COVID, the worst is behind us. Vaccines alone will still protect you.
This is, of course, not the truth, yet, people have no idea that this “COVID Victory” was suggested as top-down messaging from a polling firm hired by the Democrats.
It’s simply not true that COVID is going away simply by declaring it away, ignoring it, or wishing it away. The BA.2 variant, as the month of April begins, is on the rise and spreading rapidly from China to the UK, Scotland, and Canada, and is being tracked as the dominant variant. It’s already flooding Hospitals and causing alarm.
Biden and the Federal Government have, unfortunately, chosen war in Ukraine as a priority, leaving uninsured, and even insured people without good tools: TRUE information, and reliable data, to make informed decisions. The latest narrative is that people can “Navigate COVID”, presumably, like sailing through a temporary storm at sea, a minor fluctuation in the weather where we batten down the hatches, furl the sails, get below decks, and wait it out. It’s a poor analogy and leaves people, to use the navigation analogy, drifting.
The narrative is that one website will suffice as the key information portal and “one-stop-shop” for COVID tools and information.
In March of 2020, slightly over two years ago, all this was unthinkable. Americans clamored for the truth.
We need to embrace full-on skepticism and rejection of all the narratives sold to us as truth in all their forms to survive. We need to stop, like the customer base of GERITOL, who believed that one bottle of vitamins will cure it all, also believing that politicians have a clue about guiding us. They have abandoned ships and simply do not care. The truth is that you and I are in the water drowning while they sail the S.S. Ship Of Fools “navigating” COVID. Whether you can handle it or not, that’s the truth.