I'm Dr. Rock and Roll: The Policy of Truth

It was spring of 1989, and my girlfriend had told me some terrible news: Paul McCartney was dead.

What? I exclaimed. When did it happen? This is terrible, I thought to myself. I had been helping her study for the SAT at her uncle’s place, and the video for “My Brave Face” had come on, prompting the statement. She looked at me like I was stupid and said, “I don’t know, sometime in the 60s.” Incredulous, I pointed to the screen, asking who that man was, performing as Paul McCartney and using Paul McCartney’s face (was that the one in the jar by Eleanor Rigby’s door?). She replied that she didn’t know, just some imposter. And thus, I became acquainted with the greatest lie told in rock history – the death of Paul McCartney. We look back on that time with amazement; how could anyone believe that not only did he die, but he was replaced with someone who looked the same and possessed the same musical talent. We can start to see the nature of truth, and how we perceive it.

Other fibs have existed in the annals of music history. KISS’ breakthrough album “Alive!” wasn’t actually live, it was reproductions of KISS tracks with piped-in crowd noise, meant to simulate the concert experience. No point in denying it now, I guess, since Gene Simmons already has our money (and still enjoys trying to get it, by the looks of things). Milli Vanilli had the look, but the guys who sang on the album didn’t, so the greatest lip-syncing controversy in history ensued. They even tried to salvage a singing career, but it was cut short by Rob Pilatus’ accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription drugs.

In my medical practice, truth is held sacred, even to the point that we forget that truth is ever evolving, thanks to advances in scientific discoveries. Despite this, my patients attack with a barrage of home remedies, such as blowing smoke in a baby’s ear will help with ear infections (truth is, cigarette smoke is a risk factor for ear infections), the healing power of kombucha, and lest we forget, the “hot toddy” (a cold remedy that contained a surprisingly high level of alcohol, which, more than likely, treated an exhausted parent more than the patient by allowing the sick child to sleep deeper). With the rise of the pandemic, many alternative truths were explored when we sought sources of treatment. Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin became the standard bearers for alternative cures that we were keeping from the public, for some reason. We went from heroes to willing accomplices in some sort of massive coverup, and patients took the forbidden medicines anyway, creating critical shortages for the patients that needed the meds for approved uses. (To this day, the literature still doesn’t support the use of either medication to treat COVID).

Nowadays, I’m hearing a lot of the phrase “speaking my truth,” which I interpret to be nothing more than someone’s version of the truth, from their point of view. This is certainly a function of the times, suggesting that two people can look at the same thing and assign it truth, based on their perspective. I blame Obi-Wan Kenobi for this rise in subjective truth. I guess I’ve always considered truth in far more concrete and objective terms. I tell my patients all the time that genuine truth is easy to spot; nearly everyone agrees on it. It’s wrong to murder people. A coin dropped from the roof will fall downward. There are no good Yoko Ono songs.

Unfortunately, we live in a country where politics pervades our everyday existence. Friends against friends, family against family. I hear heartbreaking stories daily of a person that hasn’t spoken to their parents in three years because of politics. And this is where the “my truth” movement has the most devastating consequences. In determining truth, we must first shed layers of confirmation bias, which simply states that you’re more likely to accept as true something told to you by someone with whom you agree. For instance, coworker A can tell me that coworker B is cheating on his wife, and if I happen to like coworker A and dislike coworker B, I’m more likely to accept that as true. We are seeing lies perpetrated by both Democrats and Republicans about the other, and we tend to regard as truth what someone from “our team” tells us about someone on the “other team.” Going back to the Paul McCartney example, once the rumor came out that Paul was dead, those who believed this saw signs everywhere, from Paul’s black armband on the Sgt. Pepper cover, to a barefoot Paul walking out of step on the Abbey Road cover, to the hidden “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” to John proclaiming “the walrus was Paul” on “Glass Onion.” (Some cultures view walruses as symbols of the afterlife).

I give this advice to my kids: your foes can tell you the truth, and your friends can lie to you. It’s an inconvenient fact, but there are ‘lies’ in the word ‘allies.’ When agreement is at stake, we will sometimes stretch the truth to keep our friends on our side, but is that really anything more than subtle manipulation? We fall back on lazy narratives at times because we don’t want to do the work to investigate the truth. Even worse, we don’t even know where to go for the truth anymore. I used to play a game at the local Planet Fitness, where Fox News was on right next to CNN on the row of televisions. Given the same national events, where did the two networks choose to focus? I was continually amazed at how different the screens looked – I didn’t even need to listen.

I’m not here to persuade anyone to do anything but put in the work to know what the truth is. Don’t regurgitate rhetoric, no matter how much you hate its object. You may be embarrassed at what you’ve come to believe. And please, take care of each other.