An Epic Suspension of Disbelief

Analyzing the power of perception

The meeting with my new financial planner had been scheduled for Friday, without regard for what was to have transpired on the previous Tuesday. I’d entered a note on my phone with some mundane questions about my accounts and whether or not I could afford to hire a quality narrator for the audiobook version of Crossing Fifty-One.

The Wednesday morning following that particular Tuesday, I fought off the head-throbbing and stomach-churning, and added to the note:

“Elon Musk.”

You see, I have an almost irrational fear of Elon Musk. I say almost because, although the things he’s done over the past few years are freaking me out, I’m also painfully aware of how people end up in QAnon chatrooms and are lost forever. So my current goal is to not lose my ability to think critically. To that end, I asked my conservative friends to help talk me off the ledge of what I believe is going to happen in a Trump 2.0 regime. Rather than turn away from them, I wanted to understand them and their thought process as they proceeded to vote us all right into hell. The first response I got was to just breathe and maybe try to not be so attacking.

His perception, not mine.

But I digress…

In 1817, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief” in his work Biographia Literaria, where (according to Wikipedia) “he suggested that if an author could infuse a ‘human interest and semblance of truth’ into a story with implausible elements, the reader would willingly suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative.”

As someone who exclusively writes nonfiction, I recognize how my perception of things can be quite different from that of someone else in the exact same situation. As a trial lawyer, I often had to explain to jurors how two witnesses to the same event testified inconsistently. It never occurred to me then, nor does it now, to ask anyone to suspend disbelief.

You’re probably wondering… what does any of this have to do with the meeting with my new financial planner? In a nutshell: as I prepped for the meeting, I didn’t have talking to him about trans kids on my bingo card.

I need to say this: I’m not always super intuitive when I interact with people I’ve just met. Lately, though, it’s become easier, because we’re all dropping a bread crumb or two in conversation that can signal whether we can keep talking about certain things, or whether it’s better to simply focus on the weather. What’s been more challenging for me since Trump first came down his gold escalator and called all Mexicans rapists, is how to think about the people I genuinely care for and respect, whose perception of the world is very different from mine.

What is it the Christians like to say: “love the sinner, hate the sin?”

But I digress…again.

On that post-election Friday, when I sat down with the new guy—I’ll call him F.P.—it didn’t take long for me to realize that we were not feeling the same way about the election results. For one thing, he’s a huge Elon Musk fan. He launched rather jubilantly into a lengthy explanation about how FINALLY, we will start reining in all this terrible government spending.

Believe me, I have no quarrel with spending within one’s means. But when I asked F.P. about articles I’d read like this one which basically demonstrated how Trump’s plans will increase the deficit in numbers we’ve never seen before (to borrow one of Trump’s own favorite phrases), he hadn’t seen it. I then asked him about a rumor (which I’m careful to identify as one) that the “little secret” Trump has with House Speaker Mike Johnson is about shutting down the government in December. As F.P. admitted he wasn’t aware of that one either, he looked at me in that same sort of patronizing way of that friend who suggested I “just breathe.”

To be fair, how many times has Congress done this to us? Threaten to shut down the government, default on our debts, etc. only to have a last minute and short lived reprieve? At some point, we just need to get used to it, right? Which is why, when confronted by all the truly terrible things Trump has promised to do on Day 1 or shortly thereafter, his supporters insist that he doesn’t mean what he says.

Which brings me to the transgender issue. Apparently, the notion of men and boys in women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and sports is top of mind for many, if not all conservatives. Trump says on Day 1 he will ask Congress to pass a law stating that the only nationally recognized genders are male and female. Don’t believe me? Read it here. F.P. identified himself as a conservative Christian, as he asserted that our schools are “encouraging” kids to be trans. He believes the trans kids are just trying to be cool.

Like being trans is a fad. Or a choice.

Deep breath here.

Somehow, I have to believe F.P. barreled through some professional boundaries in his quest to share some of those deeply held religious beliefs I’m always hearing about. Although it came as a shock, I wasn’t entirely unprepared, having just that morning read an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by a St. Paul author and life-long Democrat who voted for Trump as…a protest? Here’s a snippet:

Sigh.

Back to the meeting: conservative Christian F.P. went to great lengths to try to convince me of his benevolence and compassion toward trans people by suggesting that they suffered from some sort of mental illness. As the professional boundaries continued to blur, I learned he is 47 years old, which puts him on the young end of Gen X. I’m also Gen X, but twelve years older, so I reached for any common ground I could find. When he wanted to say there weren’t any trans kids when we were in school, I reminded him that it wasn’t safe to be gay or trans when we were young. I didn’t mention that as more people started coming out, the AIDS crisis hit, which allowed conservative Christians just like him to declare that the gays had brought this on themselves.

I suggested he watch the Will Farrell documentary Will and Harper. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It dispenses­—quite handily, in my opinion—the notion that anyone chooses to be transgender.

But before this essay becomes a full length book, I need to try to find the point I wanted to make. And it hinges on F.P.’s suspension of disbelief:

Schools are encouraging kids to be trans.

As I cut him off, he backtracked almost immediately, as if even he knew he was telling a lie. But the cat was out of the bag, and I realized that he and I couldn’t even start from a common truth.

In Trump’s rallies toward the end of the campaign, he included a warning about the dangers of sending your little girl to school and her returning home as a boy. Or vice-versa, I don’t remember. I found it laughable, but in light of F.P.’s use of the word “encourage,” it all points to a suspension of disbelief.

So many lies just like that one became the basis of perception through the powerful rightwing echo chamber built by Elon Musk and others. You can read about that phenomenon here. The ideas swirling in those spaces are based on victimhood, misogyny, casual racism, trans-bashing and conspiracy theories about vaccines and globalism.

The truth was never going to prevail, because of the existence of an unyielding wall of perception that had been carefully built—brick by brick—since the days of AM talk radio. All the prior military and Cabinet officials warning us that Trump was a danger were not patriots, but rather, disgruntled employees. An apartment complex in Colorado was overrun by illegal immigrant gangs. The Haitians in Springfield were eating people’s pets. The Biden family was corrupt. The economy under Trump was so much better than the economy as it exists today. They’re coming for your guns!

This suspension of disbelief is how a complete lunatic like RFK Jr. acquired so much appeal, right before turning over all those voters to Trump. And now Trump will kick him to the curb. I wonder what his supporters think of this turn of events.

The fact that F.P. could blurt out—to a complete stranger no less—that schools are encouraging kids to be trans, is my Exhibit 1 in support of the suspension of disbelief. It helps him to be the victim of the “woke mob,” just like the St. Paul author and others who used their vote to protest the war in Gaza, or send a message to the intolerant party of tolerance. Whether they are all in or simply oblivious to the extraordinary human cruelty and economic disasters that are about to be unleashed, I have no way of knowing. For those closer to me, it’s easier to believe they have been duped, because I can’t bear to believe otherwise. The question I now face is: what do I do about these relationships?

Right now, I feel like I need to conclude my listening tour with the conservatives in my life and go back to just talking about the weather. Because at the end of the day, they didn’t bother to take the time and effort to consider their own suspension of disbelief; choosing instead, to cast a vote for a cruel, corrupt felon, whom ordinary Americans, (after an actual trial!) found liable for sexual assault.

And if you want to fall back on “policies” or the economy or “woke-ism” as the reason why you voted for the candidate whose only plan was Project 2025, Google oligarchies. It’s where we’re headed. JD Vance and Elon Musk are in charge. Hungary and Russia are providing the blueprints.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the dogs are pestering me for a walk and I need some fresh air.