I deride your truth-handling abilities

No truth-handler, you

Every two or three years, I go on a monthlong binge of classic Simpsons episodes—and about ten days ago, the old familiar yen seized me.

Maybe I should underscore the word old. Every time I revisit the golden age of the greatest American sitcom ever made, more time has passed since the episodes first aired, and the more they demand to be appreciated as time capsules. The world they depict grows increasingly less like the one I’m living in.

After the thing that happened on Thursday night, I watched a couple of politically-themed Simpsons episodes to get the awful taste out of my mouth. Tonight I thought it might be fun to share a few reflections.

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The Simpsons (1990)

In the stellar season 2 episode “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish,” nuclear plant owner Mr. Burns runs for governor in order to rein in the state’s environmental protection bureau. Since at this point The Simpsons still hewed to its foundational idea of being a family sitcom that more accurately reflected middle America than its smarmy live-action competitors, the world of Springfield, USA is markedly less wacky than it would become later on. The satire is sharper, and Mr. Burns is more vicious than merely grinchy.

Burns has no political experience, no moral compass, no interest in the common welfare, and no compassion for anyone—and the public knows it. But being a wealthy monopolist, he can afford to hire the sleaziest campaign manager and the most unscrupulous host of political operatives money can buy. He’s got a speechwriter, a joke writer, a spin doctor, a makeup guy, and a personal trainer to rehabilitate his image through television spots and photo ops. The idea, of course, is to sell Candidate Burns by presenting him as somebody he isn’t, choreographing all his public behavior and putting all the right platitudes and sound bites in his mouth.

Burns’ act reaches its mendacious apogee when he sits down to a televised dinner with the family of his employee Homer Simpson the night before the election. The Simpson family asks him questions the campaign manager has instructed them to memorize. Burns, unconvincingly pretending none of this is scripted, runs through the answers he’s rehearsed, which invariably veer towards canned denunciations of taxes and bureaucrats.

The narrative makes sure we’re aware of two things. One: this is a mean, dishonest, execrable way of doing politics. Two: it’s damnably effective. Through a montage, we watch Burns progressing from 6 to 42 percent in the polls.

Thirty years later, it’s fascinating to see it taken as a given that the public has to buy Burns’ act. It’s transparently, glaringly inauthentic, but it works, and there was never any doubt that it was going to work.

“My worthy opponent seems to think that the voters are gullible fools,” the incumbent governor tells a gaggle of reporters. “I’ll rely on their intelligence and good judgment.”

“Interesting strategy,” somebody mutters.

This was the prevailing wisdom in United State politics. Inauthenticity—by way of scripted soundbites, managed spectacle, and professional image control—is necessary to succeed in a political contest. A few years later, another animated sitcom (The Critic) would see one of its characters tanking his own presidential aspirations by going on camera and finally saying what he really thinks as opposed to what his speechwriter tells him to say. The episode (“All the Duke’s Men”) isn’t so much a cautionary tale against dishonesty in politics, but a cynical observation that the worst thing a politician can do is act naturally.¹

The Critic (1995)

“Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” aired in 1990. “All The Duke’s Men” aired in 1995. Two decades later, the greatest political upset in living memory would prove that the political truisms espoused by The Simpsons and The Critic no longer held. As it turns out, when the country is reeling from a recession and the long-term metastatic effects of a neoliberal FIRE economy while the public-facing wing of the political class is still reciting platitudes and slogans, feigning sympathy and outrage, and answering debate questions like chatbots, a crazy motherfucker who speaks off the cuff and gives the impression he doesn’t give a damn how anyone feels about him or how the media might make hay of his quotations is apt to strike people as a welcome change of pace.

Dave Chapelle called Trump an “honest liar.” It’s true, and it’s part of the reason why the political classes and the media had such a meltdown when Trump stopped being the joke candidate and became the GOP nominee in 2016. He wasn’t playing the game the rest of them were playing. Candidates had been taught to be absolutely petrified of letting the mask slip, to utter anything carelessly, or to stray from the program, and then Trump paraded himself onstage during their kabuki exhibition like a soused and belligerent Orson Welles in Falstaff costume. The media, the arbiter of the game, was appalled when Trump didn’t pretend to weep and grandiloquently prostrate himself before its representatives after the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape circulated, and left astonished when fact-checking his fibs, exaggerations, and bald-faced lies did nothing to slow his momentum. The man is was (and still is) a liar, a lout, a narcissist, and an all-around disgusting human being—but he came across as authentic at a time when everyone was just about resigned to fake politicians forever.

In 2016, Clinton was the Mr. Burns candidate—choreographed, focus-tested, intensely managed, and patently phony—and the world recoiled as the electoral tactics whose cynical efficacy The Simpsons bemoaned in 1990 suddenly failed to work.

Or: Trump was Duke Phillips unleashed right from the beginning, and instead of crashing and burning like the cartoon Ted Turner parody, he beat out a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state under a two-term president. It’s still incredible.

Biden was sticking to the script on Thursday night. Playing the old game. We’d been told that he’d been prepping for the debate all week. During his hoarse, mumbling, incoherent answers, the garbled rudiments of rehearsed talking points occasionally bubbled up. Even his flaccid attack lines were obviously canned in advance. I found myself getting angry at him for giving Trump such a sterling opportunity to come off as someone who could at least think for himself and speak extemporaneously, even if everything he said was a lie.

And the fucked up thing was that they were authentic lies. Trump felt and believed everything he was saying, even if all of it was easily falsifiable bullshit. Biden seemed like he understood the meaning of whatever he babbled as much as Chat GPT does when it assembles a paragraph by playing probability games. At moments he came across as even more of a phony than the bona fide pathological liar across the stage, and lent a shade of credibility to the old line that Trump is the only politician in the field who’s actually genuine.

Enough. The debate has already been discussed ad nauseum, and I’m not qualified to make any political predictions. It just drives me crazy that the coarse electioneering logic The Simpsons satirized in 1990, and which by all appearances was going to determine the rules of the game indefinitely, should have been turned on its head by someone so completely unfit for public office.

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The Simpsons revisited election satire in the season 6 episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” in which Bart’s arch-nemesis Sideshow Bob is elected Springfield’s mayor. By this point in the show’s run, things had gotten awfully wacky, and its social commentary had grown far less acerbic than before—but nobody really minded because the show was still consistently brilliant.

This is to say that “Sideshow Bob Roberts” doesn’t exactly savage the conventions of American politics, but that’s fine. What struck me this time was what a tossed-off joke indicated about how the much the cultural and media environment of the 2020s differs from the 1990s.

The Simpsons (1994)

During the climactic courthouse scene where Bart and Lisa trick Sideshow Bob into admitting he rigged the election, Bart shouts “we want the truth!” at the exasperated mayor.

“You want the truth?” Bob snarls back. “You can’t handle the truth! No truth-handler, you! Bah! I deride your truth-handling abilities!”

This, of course, is a reference to Jack Nicholson’s famous “you can’t handle the truth” speech from the 1992 film A Few Good Men.

I wasn’t even ten years old when A Few Good Men ran in theaters. My parents left me with a babysitter when they went out to see it. But when “Sideshow Bob Roberts” aired in 1994, I recognized the “you can’t handle the truth!” line because it had already been referenced everywhere. When I occasionally heard kids my own age quoting it, it was probably because it had gotten so many laughs from so many studio audiences on TV. I doubt any of my fifth- or sixth-grade peers understood its original context or its significance within the universe of the film.

Here, then, is proof of how culturally irrelevant cinema has become since then: try to remember the last time a line from a recent film achieved a level of cultural saturation on par with “you can’t handle the truth.”

(And, mind, you, A Few Good Men wasn’t even a summer blockbuster. Hell, it was adapted from a stage play. Lord, how things do change.)

1. Since this is about a state election, and since The Simpsons (and the rest of America) hadn’t yet reckoned with the idea of 24/7 cable news networks driving politics even deeper into hyperreality, the episode doesn’t do much to explore media firms’ complicity in getting any candidate in a high-profile race elected. Up until very recently, it was a matter of strategic fact that a candidate must calibrate their public performance for the journalists, pundits, and talk show hosts who will present their audiences with filtered excerpts from public appearances, sound bites, sensationalized gaffes, and so on.