A poor man's a traitor or liberator
A rich man's a thief or philanthropist
Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?
It's all in which label is able to persist
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities,
So we act as though they don't exist.
My thoughts:
I feel like this passage from this very underrated number describes the current post-truth political environment perfectly. It doesn't matter how you live your life anymore, only how people portray you and your legacy, whether they make you out to be a hero or villain. People who spend too much time on mainstream social media and who didn't study/don't value the humanities are particularly prone to this affliction of seeing people as either sinners or saints and rarely anything in between.
Ten years ago, when I was an undergraduate, one of my history professors told the class what he believed was the best argument in favor of studying history: to defend against whom he called the "Great Simplifiers." By this he meant people who manipulate others by oversimplifying history into heroes and villains, whitewashing the past, and blaming troubles and historical events on specific groups of people when, most of the time, those things are caused by many different factors. He gave Hitler as an example of how the Great Simplifiers can cause death and destruction by spreading lies about history, much as certain people in a certain government are doing now. They're trying to make anyone who questions the phony reality they promote live in fear, and lately they've been succeeding. I only hope that, ten years from now, the Great Simplifiers I speak of won't be the ones writing the history books, but that instead they will be reading indictments of their lies within said history books as they languish in prison cells.
Book script courtesy of https://ribo.zone/free/snippets/
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