How Gaslighting Fails

An African tale

Tanous family, Nairobi apartment, 1970

As my young daughter likes to mark time, 20,000 sleeps ago I was a young child like her. My dad had a private medical practice, and, back then, even doctors had some spare time, so he used his to serve as a clinical professor at the nearby medical school. There, he met a visiting professor of geography, Richard Odingo (now deceased), and his wife, Nora. The couple was from Kenya, and, before long, our families became fast friends. And not long after that, the Odingos had convinced my mom and dad to move to Africa to work and live.

Remarkably, my brother and I went along with the idea, and we soon found ourselves running around with a passel of African boys playing soccer with a tennis ball on the dirt fields of Hospital Hill School in Nairobi. This was 1970 Africa—so still wild, full of adventure, and some misadventure, too—a paradise for two young boys.

Down the way in our apartment building lived a large Russian (now Soviet) woman who was married to a Kikuyu man. (The Kikuyu tribe is one of largest ethnic groups in Kenya). Their daughter, neither white nor black, was not allowed to play with us, particularly the American boys, of which there were just my brother and me. But one day, I did talk to her; I asked her if she wanted to play with us. She said no—that she wasn’t allowed to because I was an American—but proceeded to linger on the side of the playground watching us, as she did every day.

Hours later, one of my African friends, Hezron, came to our door and told me the Russian woman wanted to see me. I scurried down the walkway and knocked on her door. Even as the door opened, I could feel and hear the rage. The Russian woman grabbed a fistful my hair, threw all 65 pounds of me into their living room, and unleashed a torrent of Russian invective, none of which I understood, of course. As the door slammed, I did understand that things were about to get a lot worse. This woman, who seemed enormous, came at me: slapping my head, kicking me on the ground, tossing me about like a ragdoll. She was screaming alternately in Russian and English that I was going to be punished for touching her daughter, which I hadn’t. At this point, I was like a little wild baboon myself, scrambling around the sparsely furnished living room trying to escape the wrath. Apparently, this woman had decided she was going to whip me and so went to fetch a belt. When she returned, there was a loud pounding on the door. Miraculously, she went to the door and opened it. There in the doorway was Hezron and a few adults from the complex. When they grabbed the Russian woman, I made a run for it, past her and out into the safety of the world outside.

The police eventually came around to investigate. The Russian woman maintained that I had somehow molested her daughter. The police interviewed me, interviewed Hezron, other kids, other adults. The whole thing was bewildering to me; I wasn’t even sure what they were talking about. I was at an age when even the concept of sex or anything to do with it was a few years away.

Even though I knew exactly what had happened that day on the playground, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had done something wrong. The Russian woman had been so vitriolic, so filled with rage at me, or the idea of me, that my 9-year-old brain had to wonder. I had never experienced that kind of anger. I played the conversation with the little girl over and over in my head but couldn’t make it add up to a beating. Days in to the investigation, the police finally interviewed the girl. And while she would undoubtedly face the wrath of her mother—who was convinced Americans were obsessed with sex and morally bankrupt—testified that I had never touched her and that we had just talked that one time.

I often think about that little girl—9 or so at the time—living under the weight of prejudice and bias, of being told something that is not true a hundred times and yet standing up and saying what she knows is right. That’s rare courage. It’s even rarer today.

It’s probably presumptuous to compare my little African tale to what is currently going on in our country, but it seems apt to me.

We’ve got a mercurial, narcissist for a president living under the political spell of a bygone era: tariffs, isolationism (except when colonizing countries), disregard for Constitutional checks and balances, and an obsession with squashing dissent. Basically, what he is doing is applying old ideas to a world that has long left those ideas behind.

So, what happens next? Economics 101 happens next: real inflation takes off, demand slackens, production slows, companies cut back on costs (people), consumer spending falls, tax receipts decline, and so forth. Allies become former allies, and suddenly the value of friends becomes palpable. Don’t believe it? Look at the 20^th century. It took a hundred years, but we ultimately left all those old ideas behind, and, in so doing, America did in fact become great. Our current trajectory is not great.

Other presidents have made similar missteps and challenges to power—Jackson, Wilson, FDR, Nixon—however, there has always been a last line of defense against abuse and other errands of fools. That last line of defense has been the sole bureaucrat, the judge, the senator, governor, or county commissioner who decides: Damn the consequences, I will stand up for what’s right.

The legal and judiciary systems are trying to stand up to the craziness, but even they are being cowed. Ultimately, they don’t really have that much power. If Trump defies the Supreme Court on this ruling or that, what can they really do?

Congress does, however, have power. They are, for the most part, smart people. They are, for the most part, rational, successful businesspeople. They are not, for the most part, delusional. Are they so worried about losing a 2- or 6-year job that they can’t speak up when they witness gaslighting like the blaming of Ukraine for the Soviets’ invading their country and crushing their population? Can they not speak up when we take a wrecking ball to the global economy (which in the past has been disproportionately good to the U.S.)? Or to the global climate? Can they not speak up when Elon Musk, a political gadfly and white nationalist sympathizer, carves up people’s lives like a cheap steak? Can they not speak up when a president defies a separate but equal branch of government?

If a 9-year-old girl can speak up against an abusive, tyrant of a mother, why can’t these men and women at the pinnacle of power speak up against a misguided president? What they don’t seem to grasp, or choose not to, is a credo a military friend of mine lives by: “No one else is coming.” A war analogy may seem dramatic, but cozying up to known despots and war criminals, ruining people’s retirements, upending their work lives seems dramatic, too.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Maybe so, but in this situation, I don’t think we have that kind of time.