In his new film, The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a pudgy everyman who lives in Anytown in a utopian world where lies don’t exist—until he tells one.
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The focus on the incivility of Congressman Joe Wilson’s “YOU LIE!” outburst effectively discounted the fact that it was he who was lying. |
“I said something that wasn’t…what’s the word for it?” says Mark, trying to describe that first fib. “There isn’t a word for it. I said something that wasn’t.”
There is no word for “true” in that alternate universe, because truth is the everyday state of affairs. In other words, it’s a Bizarro version of where we live right now, which is a place where lies are the lingua franca. Where, abetted by cowed or complicit media, politicians, pundits, and celebrities seem suddenly free to prevaricate with impunity.
In the wake of Joe Wilson’s indecorous “YOU LIE!” interjection, for instance, the media focused largely on how rude it was. Followed soon after by headline-grabbing tirades from Kanye West and Serena Williams, it was lumped into endless editorials and commentaries lamenting the death of “civility” and “manners.”
But what about “truth”? As anyone who’s read H.R. 3200 is aware, President Barack Obama wasn’t lying, Wilson was. Outside of the predictable lefty blogs and talk shows, few saw fit to mention that in the furor.
Meanwhile, Wilson, after his coerced and half-assed apology, continued to use his notoriety as fodder for fundraising, and tapped out tweets proclaiming that “I will not back down from speaking the truth.”
The truth? What does the word even mean anymore?
From Time magazine glomming over Glenn Beck’s serial fabrications, to diva of disinformation Betsy McCaughey penning anti-health-care-reform op-eds in the New York Times, to the multiple places it’s trickled down into pop culture, it seems anything can be “true,” as long as it’s said loudly enough. Few people are held accountable for what they say. And so, as TV Dr. Gregory House is wont to note, “everybody lies.”
Right wing vs. reality
“I cannot tell a lie,” said George Washington. Or at least that’s what we’ve been told.
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Just read H.R. 3200 to find out for yourself. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck told a real whopper when he said last month’s Tea Party was “the largest march on Washington ever.” |
Yes, politicians and talking heads have always futzed with facts to suit their self-interest. But over the past 10 years or so, the right-wing noise machine has lied so blatantly and with such regularity that they’ve created a mirror-image dimension completely divorced from the “reality based” community.
For them, up is down and black is white. Witness Rush Limbaugh, after Congress instituted rules that forbade calling the president a “liar,” harrumphing that the House has “formally banned truth-telling in its chamber.” Or the attendee at the September 12 rally in Washington who toted a sign: JOE WILSON FOR TRUTH CZAR.
We could use such a thing, actually. It’s astounding the bald-faced falsehoods that are bandied about these days. Sarah Palin prattling on about death panels. Michelle Bachmann and her re-education camps and school sex clinics. Bottle-blond “birther queen” Orly Taitz sputtering that Obama is a usurper.
Once upon a time, the president’s press secretary wouldn’t stoop to acknowledge “made up, fictional, nonsense” (in Robert Gibbs’ words) like the fabricated uproar over the president’s birthplace. But this is the world we live in.
Recently factcheck.org put together a post titled “Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200.” The only thing surprising was that they could find just 26. It’s not for lack of trying on McCaughey’s part.
Since the mid ‘90s, McCaughey—a former board member of Cantel Medical Corporation and tobacco-industry shill—has been a gushing font of health-care propaganda. Yet instead of being execrated, she’s given a platform on actual news networks (CNN, CNBC) to spout her industry-sponsored falsehoods.
Even Wikipedia cites articles lambasting her purveyance of “misinformation,” “scare tactics,” and “ridiculous falsehood[s],” but seems hesitant to call her out explicitly. In the “talk” section of McCaughey’s page, one moderator presses the point that experts have “impugned the validity of her claims”—but others lobby to maintain the site’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, opining that “We shouldn’t…call her a liar or anything else in the encyclopedic voice.”
Gimme some fiction
Why wouldn’t someone lie in a media culture where accountability scarcely exists?
After all, the high-ups who lied about war and torture won’t be held answerable in any prosecutorial way. And Wall Street sociopaths who lied for years about the soundness of mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps still escaped real censure—in fact, as Newsweek puts it playfully, they’re already “back to being their feisty selves.”
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Lying has become so pervasive that a world where lying does not even exist, such as the one depicted in Ricky Gervais’ new movie, is now a far-fetched, fictional idea. |
So should it surprise us that lying permeates our pop culture, from the steroid epidemic in baseball to the popularity of “Mad Men”—a show, as Slate pointed out earlier this month, whose characters “are constantly lying to one another, to themselves, and occasionally to the American consumer.”
Indeed, we’ve recently seen some Hollywood types lying to themselves as they line up to show support for Roman Polanski, who, well, raped a 13 year old. P’shaw, says Whoopi Goldberg: “It wasn’t rape-rape.”
At least Goldberg was honest enough a few months back to call Glenn Beck a “lying sack of dog mess”—gratifying if only because so few others besides the Jon Stewarts and Keith Olbermanns of the world are willing to do the same.
Consider Time magazine’s recent Beck profile. Here’s a man, as Media Matters for America notes, who “tells lies of such size and obviousness, and with such frequency, that to fail to make his dishonesty clear right up front is itself dishonest.”
A recent example: Beck claimed the 9/12 Tea Party boasted an attendance of 1.7 million people, the “largest march on Washington ever.”
Untrue! But you wouldn’t know that from the story’s lede. “If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000,” it read. “If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million….”
Also untrue—it’s one or the other. The DC Fire Department estimated the crowd to be 60,000 to 70,000. Does that make them the “liberal media”?
In this information-swamped digital age, we need delineation between facts and falsehoods more than ever. Instead, we get lame attempts at “balance” and mealy-mouthed false equivalence. We get a left wing and a right wing that subscribe to separate sets of facts.
Yet even with one political party whose members and mouthpieces “retail outright lies”—in the words of Time’s Joe Klein—the problem, as ABC’s Dan Harris let slip last month, is that “the mainstream media love a good fight, even if the charges are unfounded.”
No wonder more and more people flock to sites like Factcheck, Politifact and Snopes to double- and triple-check what they’re hearing.
The good news is that it seems some folks have found one effective way of fighting back against lies and the lying liars who tell them (to quote the newly minted junior senator from Minnesota).
An article in the New York Post last week suggested Palin is having a harder time than she’d expected booking big-bucks speeches. “The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear,” one source said, “basically because they think she is a blithering idiot.”
Meanwhile, Politico reports that “liberal allies of President Barack Obama aren’t just getting mad at conservative attacks on his agenda. They are getting even in a way calculated to hit conservatives where it counts: their pockets.”
So at least we can count on one eternal verity: money talks and bullshit walks. Hopefully, as far away as possible.
This story was originally published in the Boston Phoenix from which it is reprinted with permission.
