By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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When I first heard the expression “post-truth” – it must have been only a few years ago, though I really cannot say—I was taken aback. “Post-truth” comes with a flavour that suggests that we have somehow moved out of the space where truth existed and was important, counted for something, but that era has gone.

It did not really make sense. Post-war I can handle any time, because a war is an event that takes place for a time, and ends. So when one talks of the post-war period after 1945 one is talking about a definite period that our elders actually lived and some fought in.

For the Americans, whom we instinctively follow (for reasons unknown but time will tell), postbellum is that period after the Civil War that pitted Abraham Lincoln’s Unionist forces against those nasty guys who still wanted Africans to slave for them. So, post-bellum is that period after the war.

For there to be “postbellum”, I suppose there has to be an “antebellum” as well – which is true in that American sense -- that is the period before the war when Abe was trying to talk some sense into the southerners. For obvious reasons, this kind of characterisation will take place only after the war being talked about has started, at least, and sometimes has ended.

Read: ULIMWENGU: Politicians’ ugly deeds stink long after they exit the national stage

The simple reason for this is that the terms “antebellum” and “postbellum” can only be employed after the fact of war having taken place; actually “postbellum” can only apply after the war has ended.

Now, truth is not an event but one of those attributes of human society that are taken to be timeless and eternal. It’s a quality that individuals and communities have or do not have, and for which they will be judged or recognised by those who observe them or who interact with them. The suggestion that this virtue can be outmoded, like a fad, fashion or trend, is more than slightly disturbing.

Sure, we all may have our ways of appreciating “truth” by the way we interpret whatever facts we are called upon to weigh, and sometimes we may have a serious divergence in the appreciation of those givens, but the implied assertion that we have moved beyond the era of truth is a terrifying one.

That is what is happening in America, which, as I stated above, we tend to follow willy-nilly.

A casual glance at the American political scene gives the impression that roughly half of the voters of that country have gone berserk by the way they will believe anything that post-truth Donald Trump tells them and seem ready to go to war in his defence.

For a number of years I have interested myself in Steve Bannon and his politics in Trump’s corner, and I have wondered about what the eventual final drama might be. Like Trump, Bannon does not sound like he thinks there was anything wrong with the scary thugs who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and honestly I do not see him not relishing another attempted putsch.

Bannon is a disciple of Trump, or is it the other way, that Trump is a disciple of Bannon? I will incline to believe the more likely because Bannon is the would-be thinker who has found a pliable mouthpiece with popular appeal in a certain sizeable crowd in America which will do whatever it takes to “make America again” for the white supremacists.

I sympathise with Barack Obama when he tries to remind Americans of the sorry state he found the country in when he took over in 2008, amidst the crisis with the toxic mortgages and other debilitating policies of the George W Bush era. All those were put right on Obama’s watch, but it didn’t matter because, in the post-truth logic, he was/is Kenyan, and only Trump can make America great again.

The presidential campaign currently under way in the US is going to display to us how much more deranged the Trump campaign is going to turn, and I can predict more racist and sexist slurs are going to be served up by a campaign that had hoped to have Joe Biden – old, sickly and befuddled -- for a competitor but now have to face a bouncy and bubbly Kamala Haris, who has taken on the role of an enthusiastic prosecutor looking to catch a convicted felon and bring him home to jail, at least keep him from desecrating Lincoln’s and Obama’s old residence.

But I will let the Americans pull their own chestnuts out of the fire, a task made even trickier by Trump naming his tweeting network Truth, perhaps the most ironic move by a man who cannot tell a truth to save his life.

Here at home, that word Truth is coming more and more under attack from all corners of our national, societal and communal life. We have apparently decided to embrace the post-truth ethos with gusto, and are willing to lie to each other even when it is clearly more profitable to tell the truth, which is the definition of a pathological kind of lying.

It is a psychological trait that will produce millions of hours of speeches, declarations, commitments, as well as millions of pages and volumes of reports, all signifying zero, because they are all fakes.

We will all be wasting time.

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]