Liar, liar, pants on fire

For years we have seen court witnesses in Hollywood movies place one hand on their breasts and the other on their Bibles and swear to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God, when suddenly here comes Bill riding in from the sunset, swearing by the lie, the whole lie and nothing but the lie. So we watch his lips as he pronounces that he has "no recollection" of ever having met PaulaJones…(wait)…but acknowledges that he "may very well have met her in the past". Wow, that’s designer dissimulation! Or watch those lips again…"There is no relationship" (with Monica Lewinsky). In the art of selective revelations, the sense always lies in the tense of course.

To my mind, the man is truly one of the most creative minds of our age, a towering Renaissance figure for the new, vice-is-nice millennium. He should, like the other William Shakespeare, that is — be hailed for extending the possibilities of the spoken word, for breaching the linguistic sound barrier, for innovative value additions to language. But what does everybody do — they pillory him instead! When he, in the classic mould of the world’s great wits like Oscar Wilde, acknowledges that he can resist anything but temptation, he deserves universal applause for being true to himself. But how does everyone react? They come down on him like a ton of bricks!

When he painstakingly takes time off from a back-breaking routine to dosome quick, innovative research into the concept of Original Sin, the people out there want him impeached. When he, like 20th century’s greatest saint Mahatma Gandhi, wishes to experiment with the truth, there they go again, making crass and cruel jokes about him. This Clinton-baiting is, at least in my opinion, as cruel as fox hunting and the SPCA must be alerted forthwith.

It’s a simple point really, but it needs to be forcefully reiterated in these times when immorality sometimes seems so old-fashioned and banal. We all know that being bad is infinitely more interesting than being good. In much the same way, while truth, like cotton wool is bland, boring and mono-coloured, the lie in contrast is multi-hued, with glorious gradations and possibilities. It doesn’t really need a Derrida to expound upon the state of the lie and the lie of the state: we who have been nurtured on the falsehoods of the state know everything there is to know about it.

But it’s important to acquaint oneself with the entire rangeof this useful figure of speech, which can vary from the misstatement to the make-believe. You can speak a falsehood or spin a yarn. You can commit perjury or pervert a truth. You can twist a fact or tell a tale. You can hedge, or you can be shifty. You can indulge in a half-truth, a white lie, an exaggeration, a self-deception or a plain whopper. You can engage in subterfuge or order a cover-up. You can relate a story or enter into a fantasy. You can be a sheep in wolf’s clothing or, like Bill himself, a wolf in executive suiting.

You can, in sort, invent, misrepresent, sham, fabricate, pretend, evade, shuffle, exaggerate, suppress facts, feign or go into deep denial. And, of course, you can fib in that wholesome, endearing, all-American sort of way, which is as characteristic of the world’s only superpower as Betty Crocker’s apple pie.

So I would only appeal to the American people, and the rest of the world, to give the poor man a break. Let Bill have his bouquets of Flowers, let him try to keep up withhis Joneses. These are, at best, distractions. After all, the world knows that the President of the United States has far more important affairs to settle — like bombing Iraq to the stone-age for instance.

As for that wicked T-word, it too is merely a distraction. Truth, as someone quite rightly observed year ago, is such a rare and precious commodity that we must be sparing in our use of it.