I have been just enjoying the heck out of watching NewsChannel 5's Phil Williams discover all kinds of things that aren’t true about one of Nashville’s representatives in Congress, U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles. It turns out he’s not an economist, nor a tax expert, nor a police officer, nor a fighter against sex trafficking. In another story, Williams reveals that Ogles didn’t really graduate from Vanderbilt or Dartmouth. What next?! Do we find out he doesn’t even really like mules?
Ever since the stories came out, I’ve been trying to embrace the kind of Republican values Ogles is demonstrating here — and it’s fun! I didn’t smack my brother on vacation when we were driving through Pennsylvania. I fought at Gettysburg. I didn’t eat at a potluck that Gary Sinise had been at but left before I got there. I had dinner with Gary Sinise, in fact. Sure, you could say that my Grandma Phillips was a realtor, but I prefer to view her though the Oglesian lens, through which she becomes a real estate tycoon. Just call my dad Mettatron, because he’s getting upgraded from Methodist minister to God’s Spokesperson.
If you’re also feeling a little blue, I highly recommend trying out the Ogles spin. Why should you actually have to do things when you can just say you did them and that’s good enough?
The other thing that makes me laugh about this situation — but with less mirth — is viewing it in light of Gov. Bill Lee's ongoing calls for civility. The Republican Party chops Nashville up in to three congressional districts, hands one of them to a guy every other Republican seems to hate, gives another to a guy who met his wife in high school — I mean when she was in high school and he was a grown-ass man — and then gives the third to this fabulist. This is three large middle fingers to Nashville from Republicans.
One could argue that the decent thing — the civil thing — to do would be to stop making those offensive gestures. Lee could call for an end to them. But no. Instead, the people being insulted are the ones who are supposed to be civil.
I’m kind of fascinated, too, by thinking about civility with liars. At the heart of civility is the notion that we are all operating in good faith, that we all want what’s best; we just have different ideas about what constitutes “best” and how we should get there. But Ogles literally isn’t operating in good faith. He has made up and exaggerated so much, how do his constituents know where he stands?
What if I say to Ogles that I have lived through a traumatic medical situation — even if I pump it up to sound dramatic and say that an ancient fungal infection erupted out through my neck and tried to kill me — and having experienced that, it weighs heavily on my mind that I’m alive because I have health insurance and access to good doctors where others don't. Other people in Tennessee wouldn’t be so lucky, because our health care system for poor people is not great. Therefore, I think we should massively reform health care in this state and in this country. And you can check up on that. You can talk to people who saw me in the hospitals. You can read the stuff I wrote about it at the time. You can see my scars. You can verify that I had the experience I had and understand how it’s shaped my opinion.
Can I do the same for Ogles? Can I trust that what he’s telling me about his own experiences is true? Apparently not. Could I then come to understand how those experiences inform his opinion? Obviously not. If I tell you that I love quail and have a great way of preparing it that I learned in a great culinary class that you should definitely try out, and then you find out that I’ve never eaten quail — I just stood near one at a zoo one time and all my culinary classes are actually just me watching old episodes of Good Eats on YouTube — would you share my recipe with your friends as a serious endeavor?
This is where we’re at with Ogles. How are voters supposed to trust that he’s doing what he says he’s doing in D.C.? In the old days, you could imagine The Tennessean would just move a reporter to the capitol to be specifically on the Ogles beat, fact-checking his claims in real time. But local dailies aren’t that well-staffed anymore.
You know, it’s funny to watch people panicking about AI and whether it’s becoming sentient and if people can and are having real conversations with these computerized intelligences. So far it all appears to be a bunch of panicking about a very, very sophisticated Magic 8 Ball. But here we are with the real problem in Ogles. Forget AI. Can you have a real conversation with Andy Ogles? Can you trust that his responses are real or just what he thinks he should say in that situation? Â
I don’t know how. And it's insulting — uncivil, you might say — to expect people to not care that they’re being represented by a man who claims to be whatever he wishes he was in any given minute.
