There is no Pravda in Izvestia
by Bruce Walker (7/16/08)
The miserable former citizens of the old Soviet Union had an expression – “There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda” – which, roughly translated, reads “There is no Truth in News and there is no News in Truth.” Pravda was the news organization of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Izvestiya was the news organization of the Soviet government. Pravda is “Truth” in Russian and Izvestiya is “News.”
What was true for the Soviet Union is true in America today. The mainstream media is, of course, hopelessly corrupt. Truth requires a full picture of events, with balance and perspective. Silly and banal corporations like The New York Times simply plop in whatever facts or falsehoods fit their narrow agenda, knowing that the hapless reader will lack any context with which to weigh their “news story.”
The greater problem, though, is the very idea of news in our modern world. We have been led to believe that news “happens” all the time, or at least often enough to fill a daily or hourly news cycle. While it is true that things in our world happen all the time, it is not true that important things happen all the time and it is certainly not true that unexpected things happen all the time.
Consider Barak Obama and Jeremiah Wright. When the “story” of Wright hating America and Obama sitting quietly in the pews while Wright spewed forth venom broke, my reaction was this: “Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather!” What I mean, of course, was that anyone who followed modern history could (or should) have predicted that the most Leftist member of the Senate, a man who devoted his young adult life to community action programs, would consider America racist, imperialist, bigoted and malign.
A man like Obama would have squirmed right through the pews in any normal church - one which preached universal love, which condemned envy as a grand sin, which appreciated Americans as the most deeply religious people on Earth, and which felt that conforming our culture more to Judeo-Christian values would solve nearly all our social problems (rather than relying upon endless government programs.) Jeremiah Wright was priceless political ammunition in nailing Obama down to his true self, a man who saw Americans as “clinging” to their faith, but the fact that Obama’s preacher would be such an unholy man was as predictable as the sunset. But we have come to call this “News.”
The idea that core principles do not evolve and do not blow with the winds of every change troubles many people, and not just Leftists. The internet, cell phones, blackberries and countless other vehicles for information have led far too many of us into believing that important information must exist in variety and quantify sufficient to fill up all these tools of communication. History moves at its own pace. Moral values are constant. God, the anchor of all we should know, is then, now and forever. We are all small things, and our duty is to seek what is true and to do what is right.
We cannot cure the evil in men’s souls with better health care, more schooling or greater wealth. We tell ourselves that we can because this false hope makes us feel more important. Nearly all our “problems” are ethical and spiritual: Our problems are not “bad health systems,” “poor education,” or “bad economic policies.” We who live in the healthiest, best educated and richest society in human history ought to know that, but the hook of hubris lurks behind every technological gadget or new toy.
Why is global warming such a hot issue (pardon the pun)? What assumption hides and darts behind the grand lie of global warming? We – citizens of Earth! – can change our planet, alter its future, and make our very own Genesis. We have undone Mark Twain: not only do we talk about the weather, but we do something about it. This was just what the Soviets, the editors and publishers of Pravda and Izvestiya, believed: Man could conquer the university, rewrite history, and control human nature. The Soviet counterpart to the hideous joke of global warming was Lysenko, the quack geneticist who persuaded Stalin that acquired characteristics could be transmitted genetically – man could change his own genes.
Knowledge of our helplessness, our mortality, our human nature – this sort of knowledge, rather than the childish knowledge of “News,” haunts Leftists who would be gods. These facts shift us back to what matters, not “News,” but rather ancient truth. Our choices in life are simple (grasping that, for conservatives who yearn for the essence of Reagan, was the heart of his noble brilliance.)
We can seek truth or embrace a cacophony of mischievous lies. We can hold fast to eternal truths or we can puff ourselves up with dreams that we have come up with something new under the sun. We can follow the clear and common orders of Micah issued many centuries ago: “Do justice. Love Mercy. Walk humbly with your Lord” or we can write our own convenient Bible. We can re-read the wisdom of Ronald Reagan, who never claimed to have invented anything new but only to have followed as faithfully as he could what was good, true and everlasting, or we can swoon at the suave words on Obama, who suggests that we can change reality. We can do one or the other of these opposites, but we cannot do both at the same time.
Reagan, famously, slept from time to time through cabinet meetings. Obama and his fawning friends in the feckless media see every moment as a new world, manufactured through the smoke and mirrors of his magical incantations of “Hope!” – the hometown and watchword of Clinton, whose true self we now know was as ordinary as any lecher, liar or larcenous creep in history. Reagan did not need to know the news, except to guide through established rules our reaction to predictable outbreaks of wickedness.
We live in a world of such events, but not a world of news. There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda. Yet we are too often consumed by the “Now,” and not the “Always” of life. Celebrities, nebbishes of puerile popular attention, are “News” all the time. Why? Can our nightmares plump lower moral purpose or shallower intellectual merit than the pathetic frightened pets of Hollywood pandering? Yet how many of us pant after the latest “scandal” of an unmarried mother, an addicted actor, or a miserable couple whose single “newsworthy” quality is fame? How many of us follow the ubiquitous magazines covered with images of beautiful, troubled, unexceptional women who without attention would probably be normal and happy? What, on Earth, do we see in all this?
We see in all this – breathless news stories from pretty newsreaders, spun sugar from the mouths of pretty-boy politicians, titillating tales about pretty starlets – the reflection of momentary things made large and grand by tricks into something we fancy really matters. We not only see these reflections, but we are hypnotized by these reflections as well. Still, there is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda.
Yet there is something within us – within us conservatives and other normal people, I mean – which tugs us back to simplicity and nobility. Men and women join our armed forces for the old, great love of honor and duty – the Fourth of July, if nothing else, should have brought home that haunting, beautiful truth. War brings these people horribly close to human mortality, and yet we smell that they are on to something. We grouse and groan because there is no Reagan anymore, and yet the genius of Reagan was his indifference to news: The seeds of Reagan are planted every time the sun rises in every soul which God has made.
Without firing a shot, with only the power of his voice, Ronald Reagan brought down the façade of “Nowism” which rejects the lessons of history or the teachings of Torah and of Gospels. America and Israel show clearly that the distractions of today are nothing beyond the great mountain ranges of truth and promise. “Nowism,” this misguided pride of our moment in eternity, is Leftism. It is the Bolshevism which shouted “News!” and “Truth!” every day, as if those changed all the time. The slaves of Soviet Russia like their deliverer Ronald Reagan understood what we should understand as well: There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda.
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