Telling the truth

Most of us are taught to tell the truth at a very young age. Unfortunately, the lesson doesn’t stick until much later, if ever.

How many of us have denied taking a piece of candy or a cookie without a parent’s permission, while wiping crumbs off of our shirt or licking chocolate off of our fingers.

For most of us, the lesson to be honest, whether to oneself or others, never fully sticks. If someone says they are completely honest, 100 percent of the time, they are either lying or they are the most boring people on the face of the planet and should not be trusted as they are likely aliens.

The truth has been in the news a lot lately and not because people are being amazingly truthful. Author James Frey has been under the microscope since TheSmokingGun.com discovered untruths in his memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” and last week he had to answer to a very unhappy Oprah Winfrey, who had previously defended him and the book, about the lies in his book.

The question is, is embellishment the same thing as lying? I suppose the answer is that if people expect that you are telling the truth, any embellishment is a lie. If you tell people that you were in jail for three months but never did any jail time, that embellishment or exaggeration is a lie.

We wouldn’t accept it if Martin Luther King Jr. really wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” at Club La Vila in Panama City. While the letter may be moving and contain many truths about the state of the world and the author’s soul, the message would ring a little hollow knowing that it was written while the author sucked down drinks decorated by little pink umbrellas.

I have no doubt that the people who have read Frey’s book were moved by the character’s return to sobriety, nor do I doubt that it likely inspired some of the readers to give sobriety a better chance than they had in the past. All Frey had to do was not say that it was a memoir. If he had called it a novel, Frey could still be hailed as a heroic author championing the cause of sobriety, instead of being known as a liar who got publicly scolded by Oprah.

Frey’s not the only liar whose untruths have been made public and there will be more to come. We’ve had athletes deny taking steroids but test positive and politicians deny affairs and involvement in shady dealings among countless other things and get caught in their lies soon afterwards.

What’s funny is that we always act surprised when a new liar is exposed.

We gasp collectively and ask, “How could they lie to us like that” when we know lying is often both easy and convenient, while also being easily justified in our mind. These “little white lies” may prevent arguments and save friendships and I’m not suggesting we ditch white lies all together.

White lies make the world go around and complete honesty would likely cause mass chaos. If husbands started telling wives that they were looking at other women in a restaurant or a wife admitted to her husband that he was getting chunky or kissed like a St. Bernard, feelings could be hurt and families could be destroyed.

I had a teacher who often recited this quote from Walter Scott: “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Dealing with high school students, the man had dozens of chances each day to use this quote, and he did, but unfortunately it could be used today on many people in the public eye. Perhaps we shouldn’t hold public figures to a higher standard than ourselves, but if they are reflections or representatives of modern society, then maybe we should hold them to the highest standards possible.

We should and must demand the truth from the political figures who represent us and the members of the media that are giving us the news of the world. Too often now, news, whether handled by a reporter or a political handler, is spin. The “truth” is actually phrases drenched in “truthiness.” Truthiness was the word of 2005, according to the American Dialect Society, and is defined, by Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” as “truth that wouldn’t be held back by the facts.”

It appears that Frey wrote “A Million Little Pieces” with a heaping help of truthiness, which is fine if the people know that’s what they are getting.

I am just waiting for the day when people expect less truthiness and more truth. I won’t hold my breath though. The truth hurts and, honestly, no one likes the sting of certain truths or the shame of having to be the one to come forward to tell the truth.

People should remember what it was like to admit that, yes, they did take a piece of candy without asking. After the tears were shed and a timeout was served, life went on. Their parents still loved them and they weren’t forever branded as a bad person.

Frey, to his credit, faced the music and the controversy will in all likelihood sell thousands of more books. He will write again and his book will be made into a movie where all of this unpleasantness will undoubtedly resurface to drum up interest in the film.

People will always remember the lie, because they will be reminded of it, but Frey will know that the truth came out and he was still alive and successful. His parents probably still love him and his publisher probably still loves him too.