David McElroy

Some families have a child who’s just plain different from everybody else. When everybody else zigs, the oddball zags. In my animal family, that delightful oddball is Dagny.

I found her in the trash. More accurately, I found her underneath the trash — under a big blue dumpster in the little downtown area of the suburb where I live. She was tiny.

Around her neck, she had a ribbon with a bell on it. But it was the middle of the night and there were no houses for blocks. She was dirty and skinny and scared. She had to come home with me.

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I kept thinking this week about the scenario I mentioned a few days ago about slaves wanting to escape. It occurs to me that this metaphor works for many of the situations in our lives. What lessons can we draw from it?

My mind keeps going back to those plantation slaves a couple of centuries ago. There were many of them. There were few people guarding them. Why didn’t more of them escape? Or at least make serious attempts?

The answer I keep coming to disturbs me, because it condemns me for things I’ve done at various points in my own life — maybe even including the present — because it suggests that the reason is fear and a cowardly need to be certain. Escaping doesn’t come through fear or chasing certainty. It comes from exercising openness and faith. Most of us are naturally afraid of the uncertainty in the distance, so we cling to whatever kind of bondage we’ve gotten ourselves into.

There are a lot of things I’m not certain about. In fact, “I don’t know,” is something I say frequently — and I’m comfortable with that. I know that if I insist on certainty before I take a risk, I’m dooming myself to a kind of misery stuck with what I have. I say that because I’ve done it before.

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In his 1925 book, “Mein Kampf,” Adolph Hitler explained what he famously called “the big lie.” He said that if you tell a lie that’s big enough, people will believe it, because they have trouble believing someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Even though he wrote 86 years ago, that’s the heart of the playbook of modern politics.

The latest example is an attack launched by some progressive left liberal sites on Rick Perry. Nobody could accuse me of being a Perry sympathizer, but I’m a big fan of the truth. The accusation from PoliticusUSA and DailyKos is nothing but the Big Lie. Here’s the lede on the DailyKos story:

“It seems that the GOP’s present white savior, Rick Perry, has a BIG porno problem. Back in 1995, when his bouffant hairdo was barely all the rage, Rick Perry invested thousands of dollars into Movie Gallery, Inc, a porn distributor company. It was the largest distributor of porn movies, and was even opposed by the conservative American Family Association….”

That sounds pretty dramatic and clear-cut. It would be pretty hypocritical of conservative Christian-talking Perry, wouldn’t it? The problem is that it’s misleading at best. Movie Gallery wasn’t a “porn distributor company.” It was a huge Alabama-based company that became the second largest movie rental chain in the country. It was Blockbuster‘s biggest competitor, back when movie rental chains still mattered.

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