El Pepe, LeBron, and Trump
247
sports writers always do: reporting both what actually happened and the meaning or significance of what happened. In that crucial regard, after watching a sporting event, sports writers do what literary critics do after reading a book. We are always faced with making sense of the world, whether it is a sporting event or a novel or a statement by a politician. One of the many gifts of art and literature is that they help us understand that doing so is often extremely difficult. In our time we need to remind ourselves of that, especially at a moment in our national political life when just the opposite is true, namely, it is not difficult to see a bald-faced lie as a lie, even if it is told by the president of the United States Interpreting what is actually happening in the world, including the political world, is of course not easy, and this is obviously the case with interpreting both works of art and sporting events. Even as such acts of interpretation can be difficult, we relish and are grateful for the rich complexity in understanding the world that art and politics and literature open up for us. But understanding that complexity provides no license for claiming that it is always just a matter of interpretation; it also compels us to recognize that there are important distinctions to be drawn between one kind of discourse and another. However multi-faceted some objects of interpretation may be, some interpretations are simply wrong: 2 +2 is not 5; the color red is not easily mistaken for blue; Ron Sharp is not a better writer than John Keats or a better basketball player than LeBron James. Issues of interpretation are not only complex and consequential in themselves; they are also hugely consequential in our daily lives. As I look back over the arc of my own life, I have now, like generations before me, come to understand certain past experiences in new ways. Is this not what we mean by education? There is no way of knowing how much self-awareness or intentionality President Trump brings to his complete disregard for any notion of truth or of accuracy in interpretation. The immensely complex and important issues of meaning and interpretation that I have been addressing in this essay have now been kicked into another dimension altogether by a president who is daily eroding, perhaps even intentionally undermining, any legitimate conception of truth at all. Fifty years ago I decided that I was much more likely to be able