By Victor Greto
It’s so easy to lie.
We all do it, more than we’d ever admit to ourselves.
Of course, we’ve had plenty of practice. From our youth on, whether we lie over something as innocuous as taking an extra cookie or murmuring a sweet nothing that is truly nothing in our loved one’s ear, it’s all the same.
Sometimes it’s sort of true.
But let’s face it, we cut corners, prevaricate, haw and hem, or perhaps just haw, then hem later, just in case.
What do you really think of me, your partner may boldly ask one evening, in the dark, or over a pleasant dinner.
Well, I love you. OK?
We’ve been given examples of how to do it throughout our lives: from that nonsense we were fed by our parents about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny to our own certitude that our parents just had to be totally in love when they produced moi.
Still, you have to wonder why successful people lie, when it seems so gratuitous.
Why, say, a guy who wrote a book that won a Pulitzer Prize lied to his students about what he did during the Vietnam era.
Joseph Ellis, author of Founding Brothers, the book that won the prize that leaves many writers knock-kneed, and who also is a history teacher at Mount Holyoke College in Amherst, Mass., consistently lied to his students.
He told them he had gone to the Vietnam War, and then, to have it both ways, told them that when he returned, he was an instrumental player in anti-war protests.
He was really teaching at a military college during the war. Aiding and abetting, after all.
A completely unnecessary lie, though. Not like, say, Bill Clinton lying about Monica Lewinsky, or Richard Nixon lamenting he wasn’t a crook.
Why is the truth personal and lies for everyone else?
Still, someone who can weave a tale like Ellis – his book is very good – shouldn’t have to lie about himself.
But he did, and has since apologized.
Very embarrassing.
Gives teachers a bad name.
Come to think of it, it gives all of us who lie every day without consequence a bad conscience, too.
But because of all that, I can understand it.
It’s all about stitching yet another patch on that crazy quilt image we have of ourselves. It’s more so for teachers who stand in front of dozens of students each day to show them a new way of looking at the world.
I teach history on occasion, and I have to admit it. One of the greatest thrills you get out of the job is seeing students’ eyes light up when you give them insight into a subject that affords them pause to ponder their own lives and places in the world.
It’s patronizingly intoxicating.
And that’s the problem.
It’s analogous to my mom and dad, who insisted on keeping the Santa Claus thing going for so long, instead of just saying honestly that they loved me and wanted to show their love by giving me something on a day they believed was special.
It would have been just as wonderful. Maybe more so. But it certainly would have been enough.
But they just couldn’t, or didn’t. So they lied.
Those kinds of lies, those patronizing teacher-student, parent-child lies, often seem the most self-effacing and beautiful, because they’re done for what is considered a greater end: ennobling the child or the student with some sort of prettified vision, however fuzzily dreamed.
But, alas, all it really does is help us along the road to everyday lies and falsely allusive hints, toward an outright fear of telling the truth.
Ellis didn’t go to Vietnam, didn’t protest the war; but he is a human being who loves and hates and has strengths and weaknesses, and writes pretty well.
That’s good enough for me.
Perhaps it’s good enough for him now, too.