Talk about Power of Story! Literally *and* figuratively.
This week the news includes a provocative book about true believers [1] versus doubtful thinkers, confessions and confrontations, legalized academic cheating [2], even a new lawsuit about God-given truth as fraud. Who is manipulating innocent masses, and with what lies? Can cheating and conspiracy to defraud ever serve the larger cause of truth?
What do we really owe people we believe are getting conned? [3]
With James Frey versus Oprah as only the latest public chapter in this powerful story, we're being forced on every front to face our ambivalence about truth and lies and how we confuse them to our own detriment [4] -- is my blogging either, neither or both? I feel a headache coming on, and that's both truth and lie -- so maybe it's not surprising that now the Bible itself is legally challenged as fraudulent memoir [5] rather than historical fact and redemptive truth, thereby duping those desperate to believe.
A righteously indignant Maureen Dowd [6] labels Oprah the saint, Frey the sinner, his bestselling book "bunk" and our President no better than Frey, that he too defrauded us and the wages of his sin are death, not redemption.
She does this with a straight, Pulitzer-Prize winning face, omitting equally true facts of her lying news colleague Jayson Blair, and her venerable publication's contradictory roles in the Wilson-Plame-Miller circle of cynicism -- fact-stacking for dramatic effect, self-interested stonewalling and hype, and general manipulation of its public powers -- which together left us with no one to believe about any of it.
Note to the New York Times, and to public and private eyes and spies everywhere: whatever competitive lying that whole mess turns out to have been about, don't expect us to "believe" that any of YOU believed in our right to the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. (Sadly, even the guy on the white horse of truth, whom I liked and admired, apparently had rules and codes he believed in more than unexpurgated, unspun facts and truth.)
So our belief in academic and intellectual accountability is manipulated everywhere, in public and private acts big and small. Prominent historians such as Stephen Ambrose come under fire for fraud. Scientists defraud research journals. Teachers cheat with standardized testing, pandering to our need to believe they represent facts and truth and critical thinking. Charities cheat with money entrusted to them for making the world a better place, child protection employees falsify reports with tragic results, ad nauseum.
Thus we're all too familiar with belief issues when it comes to public stories from textbooks to memoirs, politics and news. The new twist is religious issues as fraud.
Intelligent Design versus evolution. Catholic Church child abuse scandals, with institutional lying for generations to cover it all up.
(Isn't Maureen Dowd a good Catholic girl? [7] Hmm . . . she is right in the
middle of ALL of this, isn't she? I may need to learn more about her,
connections keep popping up . . .didn't she just publish her own somewhat dubious nonfiction memoirs [8]?)
We lie to our friends and lovers, and whether we get caught or not, maybe personal lies aren't different when it comes to the larger harm -- Excalibur's Merlin darkly warns [9] his brash and ethically challenged warrior-disciple that "when a man lies, he murders some part of the world."
Oscar Wilde said our supposedly harmless lie about telling the truth, the one we teach our kids about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, reflects how truth-worshipping our lying culture is, a point reiterated this week by Jerry Stahl:
" . . .The anecdote, Wilde noted, perfectly exemplifies the American psyche: all about honesty, and completely contrived.
Now, as then, we are a people grown fat on fabrication [10]. The truth is just another artificial flavor . . ."
We scream for a little (head)chopping in the name of truth now and again, ho-hum, makes great fiction for the news and publishing industries, but all we can come up with
as society-wide solution -- seriously?? -- is re-labeling the other guy's truth? And alternately defending and confessing our own lies while continuing to teach them to our kids? What good is that?
No wonder public schools are dysfunctional and public education an oxymoron. There IS no truth we can
agree on objectively, to teach kids. And the truth is we know it and won't fix it.
Wilde again:
. . . tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability . . . Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar [11].
Catholic leaders claim The Da Vinci Code is
manipulation of belief [12], fraud for profit, harmful lies we must warn the world to reject.
Now comes the titillating and, one supposes, quite predictable reverse play, the
crowning glory of the news and belief cycle (whoops, not to be redundant!) -- historical Christianity itself challenged as fraud [13], with the courts as the objective Standard of Truth.
It's being called "abuse of popular belief" by the plaintiff.
Can we even call these stories about the stories actual news -- or is it closer to
sensationalized fiction in service of larger redemptive "truth?" Words
seldom fail me, let's see, where's the connected Power of Story in all
this . . . yeah, " abuse of popular belief [14]" is a keeper.
I think it's time we add it to our mandatory graduation standards -- if we can find anyone qualified to teach the course.
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