Spinning in Infinity
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

I was all of seven years old when I was introduced to American politics. 1 had a broken leg, and had to stay home from school for three long months. In God's providence, while I was home and stuck inside, my usually trustworthy friend, the idiot box, was filled with idiots. Watergate was all the rage, and the congressional hearings took up every channel. (For you youngsters, that was all three.) It is said that Carter gave us a national malaise, but Nixon sure was no help. He headed us down that path. I remember talking to my parents about all this, "Did the president tell a lie?" I asked incredulously. "It appears he may have", my parents explained. They went on to tell me about their own initial experience of disillusionment. It was back in the fifties, when everyone liked Ike. Everyone, that is, except Kruschev. While Kruschev never did manage to bury us, he did manage to shoot down Francis Gary Power's U2 spy plane over Soviet territory. But he managed more than that. Eisenhower, no doubt based on the counsel given him by his cronies in the military-industrial complex, insisted to the believing American people that there had been no spy plane flying over the Soviet Union. The U2, you see, flew so high that it was believed that no downed pilot could survive. That belief was wrong, and so Kruschev trotted out his living prisoner, who served as the smoking gun of Ike's lie.

There was an unhealthy trust in the trustworthiness of government in my little heart, and decades before, in the hearts of my parents. We once lived in a world in which it was taken for granted that our political leaders, especially on matters of national importance, would tell us the truth. We look at such credulity, and pat ourselves on our collective back for our modem cynicism that reasons you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving. The trouble is that when we expect our political leaders to lie to us, they do. And when we expect them to lie, we accept their lies. In short order we begin to praise them for their lies.

When Nixon was caught covering up the Watergate break-in, he was essentially forced to resign. When Reagan sent his aides to lie to Congressional hearings on Iran-Contra, those on the right thought it was just ducky. A lie told fighting the commies, they seemed to reason, wasn't really a lie. When Bush ran for re-election after he lied that there would be no new taxes under his administration, conservatives again pleaded with us to vote for him. When Clinton looked into the camera and told the nation, "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky", and likewise lied to a grand jury, "conservatives" in the Senate refused to unseat him. Now the question is not whether or not a given politico will lie to us, but how well will he do? If he sounds believable, we won't believe him, but give him points for how well he did.

Because we expect it, because we have lived through so many big lies, the little lies fall like so much rain. And so we live in perpetual spin. When the President pulled his so-called Solomon act on the funding for fetal tissue research, we became a massive gyroscope~ being spun every which way but loose. It begins with the President's campaign as a "pro-lifer." How did he earn that label? It got stuck on him in the spin cycle. He made no commitments to appoint Supreme Court justices who would treat Roe v. Wade as the vicious political activism that it was. He affirmed his conviction that the state ought to protect the freedom of a doctor and a mother to take away the freedom, and the life of any unborn child conceived as the result of rape or incest. Next we are treated to the images of anguish as the President is pulled by compassion on the one hand and conservatism on the other. Then the wisdom was revealed. "We'll pay for you to slice and dice these butchered babies, but we won't pay for any more." Never was their any frank discussion about the real issue, should the state protect the right to destroy unborn children, whether through research, through freezing them, through choosing the most viable in in vitro, or through ordinary abortion mills.

The problem is that once we start to accept the lies, we start to accept the spin. And once we start to accept the spin, then we start to participate in it. Thus, as the president hands over a check and the remains of murdered babies to modem day Mengeles, his friends in the religious right begin to talk about this great victory. Only Ken Conner, among prominent leaders of the religious right, he of the Family Research Council, stood firm, and refused to join in the spin parade. That no one else stood firm, and that Ken did did not surprise me. He is a man of integrity. The others are not.

Which brings us to our solution. We ought not go back to the days of the Cleavers, when everyone assumed that our political leaders loved us as their children, and would never lie to us. We should expect the lies, and expect the spin. But we should not accept either. We should speak clearly, forthrightly and call our leaders back to honesty. We should demand the truth, and refuse to be put to sleep. And those "leaders" who play those games must also be put to shame, and out to pasture.

Politicians have lied from the beginning. And they have plundered those over whom they rule. They have sold their consciences, and bought votes. They have served themselves and their friends, and have not served justice. All of this is not new. But none of this is right. Calling it realpolitik, or "the way things get done" is just more spin. If we want to stop the political world from spinning, we must get off.