D R A M A_ Q U E E N

Drama Queen for a Day
Slim and grim: Drama Queen's favorite terrible diets

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T A B L E_T A L K

You know it's a community when the mothers-to-be begin comparing due dates. Visit the virtual baby shower in the Mothers Who Think area of Table Talk

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Love Sallie Tisdale's "Second Thoughts"? Buy her books at BarnesandNoble.com!
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R E C E N T L Y

Breed old, die late and leave a beautiful brain
By Michele Y. Pridmore-Brown
The evidence is in: Old mothers live longer and are smarter than the rest of us
(03/24/99)

"Jungle Book" fever
By Peter Matthiessen
How a childhood spent reading Kipling's wondrous tales gave a writer his spots -- India, Siberia, Africa
(03/23/99)

A life without play dates
By Yona Zeldis McDonough
Arthur the aardvark's parent-free life
(03/22/99)

The nurture assumption
By Jennifer Kahn
Some women just don't want to have kids. So why does that make us abnormal?
(03/19/99)

Is that all there is?
By Anne Lamott
Explaining death and the hereafter to a kid who wants to be cryogenically frozen
(03/18/99)

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BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Salon Columnists

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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[ SECOND THOUGHTS | BY SALLIE TISDALE ]

OR IF YOU'RE GOING TO LIE, AT LEAST DO IT TRUTHFULLY.
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I knew a little girl who didn't know how to lie. She lied all the time, but she didn't know how.

"Are you lying, Carey?" I would say.

"Yes!" she'd always reply, brightly, glad to be of help.

Liar, liar -- what a terrible chant. "It's bad enough that you did it," our parents said. "But to lie about it!" We are taught to confess our sins, admit our mistakes, tell our secrets -- so our sins and mistakes can be examined and judged, our secrets known.

Most people are against lying -- at least, they claim to be. Who knows if they're telling the truth? Perhaps the only thing we can really agree on about lying is that everyone does it sometimes. The person who claims otherwise has simply told you the first one.

Good liars stick close to the truth, live close to the truth. Lies have to rest in what the liar knows to be true: They are based in the truth, because lies are by definition a careful deviation from it. Lying is a deliberate act, never an accident, and good lies are hard not to believe.

Certain lies are oil in the social machine, the ritual courtesies of daily contact. A little exaggeration, casting careful shadows and flattering light upon ourselves, upon each other. There are ordinary lies I've never told. I've never lied about my age or pretended my hair color was natural. I've never cheated on a test. But other lies come quickly. I've always found it hard to say, "I made a mistake," and would exaggerate to protect my fragile self-esteem. Most of us lie in just this way: little deceits and quick dissimulations to spare ourselves from some impending small doom -- social embarrassment, parental anger or spousal punishment.

These lies, the ones we claim to engage in for the sake of other people, are often meant to save ourselves from a little discomfort. No more, no less. A man tells me he never lies. "Except to my kids," he adds at the last minute, "so I don't have to deal with something I'd rather not discuss."

Most lies aren't "white" at all -- they're not even very gray. We just wish they were, and so we lie to ourselves about them. Lies are like that odd reflex in your leg, popping up at the first blow of the little hammers of life, seemingly out of our control. "It's for his own good." "It's such a small thing." "Everybody does it."

We can get used to lying awfully fast. "This time it's different," we tell ourselves. "That person wouldn't understand." "That rule doesn't apply here." Step by step: the lie, the excuse, the next lie, each one requiring us to make an exception to a rule, until everything is excepted. Until the rule catches up.

So many ways to fail here. We lie by commission, by omission and with silence. We lie to get and to avoid having to pay the various prices extracted from us, to punish others and to avoid punishment. We lie to stay safe. Everyone lies.

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For more than a year -- and what a long year -- we've been subjected to a public chastising bigger than one any mother has ever given a wayward son, and it's all been about a lie. A big lie, a little lie? One that mattered, one that didn't? And how many lies were told in the service of proving one point of view or the other?

President Clinton's lies were painfully mundane. Caught with our pants down, with so much at stake, we stood frozen in panic. Clinton's wavering definition of reality was terribly familiar. Few of us look on life without flinching now and then, and none of us is free from the temptation to turn away. That we understood why and how Clinton did what he did somehow made it worse for a lot of us. His shambling humanity went too far when he showed himself to be no better than we are almost all the time. His detractors, in trying to prove that point, managed to prove their own shambling, flawed humanity as well. They managed to lie, cheat, steal, betray and bluster at least as well as the rest of us.

Is lying ever all right? Most of us would agree that lies told under coercion or to protect someone from violence fall into a different category. But if the question itself is unfair, untoward, ought not to be asked, what standard does the answer have to meet?

Sissela Bok, the philosopher who wrote "Lying," prophetically suggested that the answer lies in an internal test. Look at your lie and hold it up to a test of imagined public scrutiny. Imagine defending it in a court of your peers. Would most of them think the lie a worthy one? Not only were Clinton's lies familiar, so was his behavior in the spotlight. Most of us justify our lies exactly the way Clinton did. First, we scamper around claiming that what we said wasn't necessarily a lie. And then we claim it was none of your business in the first place. And then we try to explain.

(Have I lied in this story? What have I shaded, left out, reworked for the sake of rhythm, to make a point?)

Good laws acknowledge that people will protect themselves any way they can, and set reasonable boundaries for what self-defense is allowed. Good laws recognize people as imperfect, complicated creatures, even while holding each of us to a higher standard than our animal instincts would allow. The lies that harm the most people are, after all, the ones told by the law itself -- told by governments to the people, told so often and so loudly they become accepted as truth; they become rumor and then fact and then, in the end, history.

I want never to lie, hope never to be in a situation where a lie seems the best choice available. But I'm not such a good human being, not yet. The best I can hope for is only to lie truthfully: to lie knowing I am lying, without flinching and without excuse, admitting freely to myself what I have done. I hope never to lie to myself about lying -- and this is hard.

Perhaps the central truth about lying, the one wisdom we can take away from the last endless year of self-aggrandizing public falsehood, isn't that we all lie sometimes and want to be allowed to do that. It's that we want to be lied to sometimes, lied to by ourselves and by the world. We do not always like the world we live in, our place in the world, the world's demands. We substitute a preferred version. "He really is going to get a divorce." "I love my job." "She made me hit her; this is all her fault." With the lie, we can temporarily create a new world.

Tell me the truth -- but perhaps not every truth, all the time. We beg to be spared certain things. At the end of the day, most of us hope the world will lie to us with great skill -- decently, so we never have to wonder if what we're told is a lie. All these lies, this tissue of pretense we weave, are the desire to become that which we pretend to be: the desire for our lies to come true.
SALON | March 25, 1999

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