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If I Were The Truth I'd Lie
There are times when the truth itself should opt to fib or take the fifth.
It would be a damn jackass not to. Furthermore, neither it (truth) nor I tend
to be scandalized by the social tool called the lie. Along with God (in whom
some of us still trust), justice, (in which most of us have our doubts), and
freedom of speech (not always accompanied by freedom of thought), we have
built ourselves a great country with no discernable immutability of culture.
It's understandable; we're young and we've come a long way. But we're
getting silly. Isn't it some kind of a paradox that the more legal we get, the
more outraged we are about lying? One definition of lie is: to be in a
helpless or defenseless state. Self-preservation is a trait given to us by
nature in order to insure our survival. Lying is as much a part of our nature
as, well, say, smiling through our teeth is. It's the old coercive effect of
circumstance upon our behavior and it is one of the building blocks of
civilization.
So what's the big deal? The big deal comes from the demands we
now make on people to be transparent in a way that defies common sense
especially given the decontextualized climate in which we go about our
lives. You have parents of dead or missing children hypocritically criticized
for consulting legal counsel. "Well, if they have nothing to hide, why would
they do that?" goes the thinking. All right, then, let's say they're
innocent of anything nefarious. Are they wise to trust in a system that has
lost its innocence? What will happen to the truth they tell if they go
unprotected in a community jumping to conclusions or bent on setting an
example?
Then there's the President, of course, who, as I understand it, is
doing nothing that hasn't been done before, but now it's suddenly taken on
witch-hunt proportions with McCarthy overtones. We're not talking
constitutional concerns here--just conjugal. When George Washington's father
asked him if it was he who cut down the cherry tree, little George was free
to chirp, "I cannot tell a lie." It was just a God-damned tree after all!
Supposed he was asked if he had fucked the neighbor's daughter? "I cannot
tell a lie"? I don't think so! I submit that if we're going to ask point-blank outlandish questions, we deserve a reasonably clever rendition of
reality . . . nothing more. "Mr. President; did you have oral sex with that
intern?" "No, Wolf, I did not; as a matter of fact, we never discussed it."
--Nimrod
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