making people doubt
accurate perception
of reality
From the passage:
Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.
In the Opinion Piece, “The Supreme Court Is Gaslighting Us All” By Jesse Wegman in the New York Times, July 12, 2024.
When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my siblings and I would often badger our Dad into taking us downtown to the Grand Rapids Public Museum.
The Museum had a whale skeleton, a hall of mammals filled with stuffed moose and elk and The Gaslight Village.
The Gaslight Village was a recreated main street of Grand Rapids as it might have appeared in the 1880’s and it was lit by gaslight.
It wasn’t much looking back, maybe 200 yards of street but it was cool.
The roadbed was of sawed off round pieces of logs and there was a horse drawn tram car with tracks and both sides of the street were lined with store fronts from the 1880s.
And it was dark!
Gaslight when you got right down to it, didn’t give much light.
Gaslight Village was contained in one big building so the street started and ended at wall.
As I remember it, one entrance was designed to make it feel that even though you walked through double doors, you entered the street from a covered bridge over the river.
The other end was a painted perspective of the town with the sides of a few buildings and the road way disappearing into the middle distance.
The painting was pretty good and it didn’t take much imagination to pretend you were going to continue walking down the main street.
That is until, despite what you perceived as the road continuing on, you walked smack into a wall.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
No Haiku For You 