 Liar, Liar
By Jim Shahin
Call it coincidence, call it fate, but I was just getting ready to send this column when I received an e-mail from my editor asking about the ETA, as he put it, of my column.
“Sherri is getting antsy,” he wrote, “which makes me antsy.”
Sherri is my editor’s boss. She, too, is an editor. Actually, she is the editor.
It’s not good when the editor is antsy. Not just her expression but her very face changes. Her mouth seems to get smaller, to the point that you wonder, as you accept the brunt of her scorn, if she might swallow her lips.
What she didn’t know — how could she? — is that there was no reason for any lip swallowing. I had everything under control.
I mean, she’s thinking, apparently, that I might miss my deadline.
I don’t know why she would think that. Let me say, for the record: I have never, ever missed a deadline.
It’s true.
But I understand, because I recognize that an editor is the opposite of a priest. Whereas a priest hears confessions, and thus a person’s unburdened truths, an editor hears disavowals, or, to put it less politely, one lie after another.
The most common lie an editor hears is from writers about meeting their deadlines. That lie, actually, is not just one lie. It is a pack of lies.
The first in the pack is “I always meet my deadline.”
The second is “I will meet this particular deadline.”
The third: “I will meet the extension.”
The fourth: “Oh, I thought you meant next May 3.”
The fifth: “If you can wait just a couple of days, I think I may have an interview with the president.”
The sixth: “The column, er, that is, the story, is on its way.”
Editors hear this stuff so much that I completely understand why my editors might lapse into occasional antsyness about me, even though I have never given them the slightest cause for even the smallest worry.
Which brings me to the subject, actually, of this column: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (which is a phrase I just made up).
The Washington Post recently ran a story about lying. According to the article, a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts named Robert Feldman found that if people were cars, their constant trafficking in falsehood would basically jam every highway in America forever.
Actually, neither Feldman nor the Post said that, exactly. I kind of made up the whole car metaphor. Just a little poetic license there.
What Feldman did say, the Post reports, is that people lie every 10 minutes.
Yes, I said every 10 minutes.
Okay, that’s a lie.
Sorry.
Sorry.
What the story actually says is this: “Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period.”
Two every 10 minutes? A dozen?
Kind of makes you wish that my lie about people lying every 10 minutes were the truth, doesn’t it? Which is part of the point of lying, according to the experts. Says the story: “[Lies] are mostly designed to please others — ‘The muffins were great’ — and as harmless bouts of self-promotion, as in, ‘Yeah, I used to play lead guitar for the Police.…’ ”
Used to play lead guitar for the Police? Has anyone actually told that lie? Isn’t there a point that a lie becomes so colossally stupid that it ceases to be a lie and becomes something else entirely? Something just waiting for a word to describe it. “That wasn’t just a lie; that was a yomachelinga!”
But the reasons for lying and the quality of lies interest me less than the sheer number we supposedly tell.
At this moment, I have cleared my mind to be aware of every thought passing through it. Hmmm, seems my mind is like West Texas, and the number of thoughts like tumbleweeds — there just isn’t that much there, and there’s very little going through.
In other words, I don’t have enough thoughts to lie twice, let alone a dozen times, every 10 minutes.
On the other hand, maybe I am lying but don’t know it.
Maybe my mind is Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, and a zillion thoughts are blazing through its mental fretboard so fast that I can’t discern them all, much less count them, as they whoosh by in their aural blur. So, maybe, in all those thoughts, I am lying my head off but just can’t hear it.
Whatever the case, I was gratified that when my editor asked the whereabouts of my column, I could say the story was on its way. The only reason it took two days (okay, maybe three) is that I was waiting for an interview with the president.
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