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Honest
to god, it’s the Flexi-truth™
by Mad Dog
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Truth
is supposed to be an absolute, like the Earth circles the Sun, matter
can neither be created nor destroyed, and anything dropped into a purse
immediately migrates to the bottom. |
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It's
getting so you don't know who to believe anymore. In the good old days,
defined as any group of years which now blur together, it was easy—you
believed your parents, your teachers, your Friends in Blue, and June
Cleaver. You didn't believe the Russians, anyone running for public
office, or the boy down the block who said you could get a girl pregnant
by holding her hand. Yuck! As if anybody would want to do that.
Now the Russians are our friends, you’re the parents, teachers will
say anything to get test scores up, and my Friends in Blue keep
insisting they clocked me doing 72 in a 30 mph zone. So what’s left to
believe? Other than the fact that anyone running for public office will
still say anything to get elected, not a lot.
Take George O’Leary. He’s the coach of the Notre Dame football team
who was recently forced to resign because it turned out he wasn’t a
hunchback. Just kidding. Actually he resigned because they discovered he
didn’t receive his master’s degree in education from New York
University as he mistakenly claimed for, oh, the past 20 years. It’s
true he did go NYU, but it was only for two semesters. And he only took
one course each semester. Whoops, my bad!
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At
least all these people told pretty benign lies. I mean, it’s not as if
they lied about their gender the way Felix Urioste did. |
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This is a very easy mistake to make. A survey by an executive search
firm found that 20 percent of job applicants manage to make similar
mistakes when writing their resume. Apparently our real lives just
aren’t good enough. This has allowed people like B.G. Burkett to
make a career out of unmasking Vietnam war vets who never set foot in
Vietnam. And it caused federal judge James Ware to blow his chance for a
seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals when it turned out that a story he had
told for years about his brother being killed right in front of
him—which he said made him “hungry for justice”—never happened.
Well, not to his brother anyway.
The
problem is, truth is supposed to be an absolute, like the Earth circles
the Sun, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and anything
dropped into a purse immediately migrates to the bottom. But all
that’s changed. Nowadays the truth is whatever we want it to be.
A few years ago actress Fran Drescher—you know, the one with the voice
like your teeth being scraped down a blackboard—told Jay Leno about
how she cut her finger on Halloween, then took a shower and changed her
clothes so she would look her best when the paramedics arrived. Good
story. Too bad it was a complete fabrication.
Her publicist claimed this is done all the time on talk shows. Well, it
also happens in books written by talk show hosts. In his book, Leading With My Chin, Jay Leno stretched the truth farther then
Pinocchio with his fingers crossed when he recounted an embarrassing
incident on Dinah Shore’s TV show. Unfortunately it never happened.
Well, not to Leno, anyway. It did happen to comedian Jeff Altman who
gladly accepted $1,000 and gave Leno permission to use the story as his
own.
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The solution is simple: make lying acceptable behavior.
Rename it Flexi-truth™ so it sounds hip and fun. |
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At
least all these people told pretty benign lies. I mean, it’s not as if
they lied about their gender the way Felix Urioste did. He’s the guy
who was arrested a few years back for stealing $40,000 from his husband
of 3½ years. Did I forget to mention that he also neglected to tell his
husband that he was a man?
Pay attention, this gets
tricky. Apparently Urioste convinced Bruce Jensen that he was pregnant
with twins after they’d had a single sexual encounter. Jensen did the
right thing and married the man he thought was a woman in a Mormon
ceremony. Of course at the time he thought Felix's name was Leasa.
"I feel pretty stupid," Jensen was reported to have said after
the police convinced him his wife was a man. Understatement is a
beautiful thing.
The problem is that, as cynical as we may be, we're really trusting
souls at heart. We believe movie stars when they tell us which brand of
adult diaper is best. We believe the Rolling Stones when they tell us—yawn—that
each tour will be their last. Face it, if we believed Bill Clinton when
he said he didn't inhale, drop trou in front of Paula Jones, or eat that
last super-sized Big Mac Combo Meal we’ll believe anything. Okay, bad
example. No one believed any of that.
The solution is simple: make lying
acceptable behavior. Rename it Flexi-truth™ so it sounds hip and fun.
With Flexi-truth™ it will be okay to appropriate someone else’s life
as long as it’s for career advancement or mutual financial gain. It
will be fine to make up stories or college degrees if it means
maintaining your public image. And with Flexi-truth™, having to
declare your sex on a marriage license will be optional. After all, if
politicians are rewarded when they stretch the truth—by getting
re-elected—why shouldn’t we be? Besides, if we made it socially
acceptable to lie it wouldn't be fun anymore. Then before long everyone
would want to start telling the truth just to rebel. Hey, would I lie to
you?
©2001 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
That's the god's honest Flexi-truth.
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