"Were it proved he lies..."

 We are now weeks into the J.D. Vance-smearing-Haitian-immigrants story, and the GOP vice presidential nominee is still refusing to acknowledge the mountain of evidence that proves his "pet-eating" claim to be nothing more than a racist slander. He refuses to walk it back. He seems to be just utterly immune to appeals to conscience, integrity, honesty, or any shred of honor in politics. 

What's so eerie and sociopathic about his behavior, after all, is that Vance not only spread an intrinsically-implausible and stigmatizing rumor that smacked of racist urban legends—but that he continued to promote it even after local officials told him point-blank that the story was a fabrication. He continued to promote it even after his lie sparked multiple bomb threats that upended life in the city he had targeted. He continued to promote it even after the governor of his state and city officials urged him to stop. He even went on TV and congratulated himself for saying it. 

What is one to do about someone with so little sense of moral self or integrity? How can one hope to answer someone who "were it proved he lies/ Were neither shamed in his own/ Nor in his neighbor's eyes" (to quote Yeats)? How can one respond to one who, as Yeats put it elsewhere, but on a similar theme—namely, the lying demagogue in politics—persistently "hawks for news/ Whatever [his] loose fantasy invent[s...] as though/ the abounding gutter had been Helicon/ Or calumny a song"? Walz will have to find an answer to these questions soon, as he debates Vance next week...

Meanwhile Vance and Trump keep lying. They keep singing their calumnies against Haitian immigrants. They keep hurling against the reputations of immigrants "whatever their loose fantasy invent." 

Trump, especially, seems to be lying about immigrants these days based on nothing more than a game of word association. Earlier this week, he said that immigrants were attacking "villages" in the US. "Villages"? We don't really have those here, in common parlance. But Trump no doubt got there by riffing on the term "invasion," which led him eventually to picture, perhaps, a group of Uruk-hais torching the Westfold of Rohan. Likewise with the term "asylum." As another writer pointed out recently, it may be the use of this term in immigration law, which keeps prompting Trump to spread the unrelated (and bogus) charge that immigrants are "coming from mental hospitals" abroad. 

Obviously, then, the truth of the matter makes no difference to them. They are riffing off of their "loose fantasy" as it comes to them. No matter how many times these men are proven wrong, they keep lying. "Were it proved they lie," they are "neither shamed in their own nor their neighbor's eye." It's sickening... And yet, that last part's not entirely true. For they are in fact shamed in many Americans' eyes. Most people are pretty disgusted by their performance during this whole Haitian episode. Vance has proven himself to be among the least popular vice presidential picks in history. There comes a certain point at which people can see through the hypocrisy, and they don't like what they see. 

And so, if Vance and Trump are themselves simply awful and immoral men, with no redeeming features, that does not mean all is quite lost for humanity. For, as Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote: "In spite of all their kind, some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth."