Confabulation

I had to look it up. I could see some roots in “con” and “fabl” looked like something made up. Google AI and Wikipedia are somewhat different. The first sounds authoritative while the second is, as usual, more nuanced. Both note an association with belief in false memories as a sign of dementia, much confidence that mistaken beliefs are true. It sounds a bit like letting someone off the hook.

A retirement home administrator once talked about current residents dividng them into the young-old and the old-old. As someone closer to her old-old all the time, I don’t like age and dementia as synonyms. But one former American president that we Canadians live next to, had difficulties that I tended to dismiss until I could see them for myself by tuning in to the last five minutes of a presidential debate. Age was not the problem.

I’m therefore concerned that so much of the press is ignoring what is right in front of them. We Canadians are coming to terms with trying to deal with such a person - who insists that we are sending enormous amounts of fentanyl to his country and must be punished. Other candidates for punishment are in the news every day – including his own supporters. It was therefore instructive to read a post this morning by Chris Truax in The Hill about a certain person’s mental decline and asking, “What Now?” as well as adding an unfamiliar word to my vocabulary.

This author believes that confabulation arrived on July 15 with the certain person’s memories of an uncle who had conversations with a serial killer. (We Canadians might put the date much earlier in terms of the fentanyl accusation, but few Americans seemed to worry about that.) The certain person goes on to talk about drug prices apparently being reduced by 1,000 percent and Truax notes that mathematical miscalculations are another symptom. Barack Obama and James Comey didn’t make up the Epstein files. Who appointed Jerome Powell? We know. It also says something about Canadians that a person like me knows all about these stories even from our own daily press. They are not a mystery

Now the US economic numbers are wrong. Blaming Canada gets a pass this yime. Instead, a certain person fires the Commissioner of Labor Statistics. He thinks the head of the Federal Reserve must go so that American can keep “doing GREAT.”

There was another article in the Australian publication, Aeon Weekly, which should give us all pause. It is entitled “How to Run the World” and written by David van Reybrouck, Philosopher Laureate for the Netherlands and Flanders. His main argument is the need for new forms of international diplomacy and is well worth reading. A couple of points struck me in relation to the news of the morning and there are some good aphorisms: “Diplomacy is distrust clad in good manners;” Worlds Fairs in the early twentieth century were “multilateralism for the millions: competitive entertainment where European countries came together to challenge each other.” Multilateralism continued with the creation of international institutions that somehow worked for a long time.

But a new threat has emerged. Climate change. The first bodies to deal with it followed the institutional model of international panels like the International Panel on Climate Change, with the COP conferences of 198 countries. The signings at these conferences, the author states, are the result of four centuries of diplomatic history. We agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at COP 29 in December of 2023. We forgot that science had known and warned about the dangers of fossil fuels for thirty years before this. The president of the largest country in the world thinks climate change a hoax. (Confabulation?) Another maxim from the author: “We are unprepared for the storms ahead and unwilling to redesign the vessel.” Nature, he notes, has no national boundaries. We are only beginning to wake up to that reality.

Van Reybrouck goes one to propose elements of innovative design that deserve another post. A commentator on our national television noted last night that after a recent US visit, he sees in Americans a growing understanding of why we Canadians are so upset.

We Canadians can wait for better tariff arrangements, we can buy local products, and we can enjoy vacations in our own country, but it is the responsibility of Americans to do something about a certain person. Protests are good. Holding elected representatives to account for their actions or lack of them is even better.