Lies and the liars who tell them

“I cannot tell a lie.” This quote is often falsely attributed to George Washington, a man who’s presented to schoolchildren as a pillar of honesty and integrity – not to mention high fashion. (Powdered hair? Flared-out pantaloons? I do declare, Miss Scarlet, methinks I’ve got a man-crush.) 

 

The irony is that not only was Washington capable of lying, he did it often. And he was good at it. As commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War, Georgie-boy had a heavy hand in the art of espionage, overseeing a massive network of spies that infiltrated British-occupied American cities. They fed him information about the redcoats’ movements, and in return he helped found a country that would become an epicenter of freedom, heroin-fueled jazz, and the Whopper.

 

He’s a revered man, obviously. Yet if he were around today, and still as deceptive, Americans would probably find a reason to hate the guy.

 

That’s because you can’t get away with dishonesty like you used to. 

 

Everything is now recorded and documented, immortalized in ones and zeroes. Absolutely everything. College students can’t streak across campus wearing Uncle Sam hats festooned with lit sparklers without the incident being uploaded to YouTube. People take pictures of their bowel movements for posterity. Heck, I can’t log onto Facebook without seeing old high school friends’ videos of their children sounding out the words to “Green Eggs and Ham” for the first time. If ever someone in my circle decides to wear Superman pajamas to their son’s first soccer game, I’ll find out about it, whether I want to or not.

 

This makes our leaders’ backtracking and false claims all the more curious. Late in 2013, as components of the Affordable Care Act were enacted, it came to pass that a handful of Americans would not be able to hold onto their then-current health insurance, despite President Obama’s earlier claims to the contrary. With the media in a tizzy, Obama stood at a podium, flag pin affixed patriotically to his lapel, and stated, in essence, “Uh, I never said that.”

 

Yeah you did, dude. Roll video.

 

There have been a rash of these incidents lately, with one coming just a couple of weeks ago from would-be presidential contender Rand Paul. Paul – whose hair, apropos of nothing, looks like a French poodle that’s been flattened by a bank safe – claimed never to have made comments skeptical of the efficacy of vaccines. Yet all one has to do is type “Rand Paul vaccines” into Google, and the first link is to a story in which he’s quoted as 

saying that vaccines can cause “mental disorders.”

 

In today’s political climate, it’s almost understandable that Paul would want to modulate certain of his positions; far from targeting merely the foil hatters and gun hoarders of his own party’s base, he’s now got to appeal to the whole dumb lot of us, and that means riding along on the safe middle road of compromise. But why wouldn’t he just say, “I’ve changed my mind?” Or, “I’ve learned something, and am no longer a blithering ninny?” He might as well toss his credibility into the Hudson with cement blocks on its feet. Maybe it’s the vaccine talking.

 

It’s not exactly the best era for any pretender to the throne to be out of touch with his or her constituents. In decades past, a public figure could be moderately uncoupled from the national zeitgeist, and citizens might only have an inkling, a trace suspicion, that the person in question was a raving boob. That era has gone the way of bell bottoms and swooshing wolf-man hairdos. Ever since home computers started connecting people to troves of information, accessible through a few keystrokes, the American people have made it clear that there are two things they want above all else: straight shooting from their elected leaders, and streaming videos of dogs dancing the “Macarena.” Not always in that order.

 

I’ll say one thing about digital pictures and video – they’re great for settling bets. This is where I make the embarrassing admission that I’m one of those dweebs who’s constantly taking snapshots, creating a cohesive life record that rivals anything on the scale of reality television stars and long-dead presidents. Occasionally, this record proves handy. About a year ago, I was shooting the breeze with a friend of mine, and there arose a disagreement over when he first started dating his wife; he said 2007, I said 2006. With my trusty laptop at the ready, I delved into my impeccably organized archives and unearthed some photos of the two of them taking gargantuan sips from a giant bowl of liquor in the mold of a constipated dragon. Subsequent images showed them dancing on a bar in Portland, hips swiveling in a manner that I’m pretty sure is forbidden on daytime television. The shots were from 2006. “What do you know,” he said. “You were right.”

 

Point being, if even my non-famous friend can’t escape from reality, then a public figure has no chance at all.

 

Politicians have always been a step or two behind the people they’re elected to represent. Americans list to starboard, and so do they – eventually. But not before railing against the immorality of starboard, denying the popularity of starboard, and calling starboard’s mother a cross-eyed goon. Then opinions “evolve,” and for about two minutes everything’s copacetic. It’s those two minutes that our tie- and pantsuit-wearing officials need to learn how to navigate. Disillusionment with the process is endemic, and it’s due in no small part to the backtracking, equivocating, and I-never-said-that evasions which are exposed so readily by our honest technologies. There’s no longer any place to hide. Better for these people to just shrug their shoulders and say, “You know what? This used to be my stance and now it’s not. Deal with it.”

 

It may not be on a par with the cherry tree fable, but with shooting that straight, even Washington himself would be impressed.