Disgraced journalist Jayson Blair may have abused his profession by fabricating stories, but he also unwittingly shed light on an open secret: America's epidemic of lying.
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Commentary by Paul Goettlich 8jun03 It's encouraging to see this type of article making the front page, even if below the fold. Last night in Berkeley, I was on hand at the showing of the movie Blue Vinyl to answer questions. About 15 people attended. After the film, I first said that it is impossible to produce polyvinyl chloride—also known as PVC and vinyl—without creating dioxin as a byproduct. And I started to talk about the often repeated phrase that "everything is toxic, so why worry?" It serves the purpose of denial. It externalizes the problem by making it something that is beyond the control of the one that repeats the phrase. Before I could finish, someone in the front row interrupted me with a burning question. What is an alternative to the PVC drainage piping that was proposed to be used on her property. I told her that there were several choices—clay tile, iron, steel, and copper—and that clay tile was probably the best. I explained that half the State of Indiana was once a tree-covered swamp and is now denuded and drained by mile after mile of clay tiles into drainage ditches. This was not the answer she wanted to hear. Now this is just speculation, but she may have meant one of two things. The first is that she wanted to know what is the best alternative plastic to use for her project. Or she might have wanted to know if some "alternative" material existed that wouldn't harm anything on earth. In either case, my answer would have been the same, that being that there is no good plastic. In fact, all earthly materials and elements, if used in the quantities that humans have grown accustomed to, have negative impacts on the earth. The real answer to the question is that there is no "environmentally friendly" drainage pipe. Furthermore, one might ask why the land around her house needs to be drained. The cause of the woman's problem is that her house was built in an inappropriate place that disrupts the natural flow of water. It should not have been built there. From that symptom of her flooded land, one can follow the causes to the over-population of Earth by humans. We are taking up too much space. Perhaps that is a bit of a stretch, but we must all come to the point where we admit the root cause of a significant portion of the environmental problems is that we have over-stepped the limits of common sense and are now seeing the rapid degradation of all ecosystems. Back to plastics; a good example of rapid degradation caused directly by humans is that in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—the most isolated and distant place from land—there is more plastic floating on the surface than zooplankton. In fact, there is 6 times more plastic by weight. A large part of that plastic has never even been made into a product. It is nurdles, or tiny little beads that were destined for a production plant somewhere in the world. They may have fallen of a container ship or gotten washed down a drain, but they are definitely first generation pellets as opposed to recycled material. To make matters worse, those little plastic bits look just like plankton. They have a specific gravity about equal to the water, so in a storm they rise, and in a calm, they sink. This means that they are thoroughly incorporated into the ocean. And while this is a worst case scenario, all sea waters are in the same state with regards to plastic. As this saddening development is examined more deeply, those nurdles are acting as magnets to the metabolites, or breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like chemicals. These endocrine disrupting chemicals are found on the surface of the nurdles at rates as high as 1 million times that found in the sea. There is no method of removing those nurdles without vacuuming the entire ocean and filtering out the plastic. Forgetting about the impossibility of such a task, it would also destroy much of the life within the seas. One of the wide range of effects of this plastic, combined with other toxicants, is that the fish are changing sex and their reproductive systems are failing. What we have here is the result of 50-odd years of the production of plastics and other synthetic chemicals. The lesson to learn is that plastic—any and all plastic—is an unsustainable material and its production should be halted immediately and until it myriad of problems can be solved. And I strongly suspect that the problems will remain and that no "alternative" plastics will be found. Whether the ingredients are outright hazards, or the quantities of materials being used are unsustainable makes little difference. Most of human technology is this way. The problems occur at their foundations of logic. Assumptions are made which are denial of the realities in order to profit and/or maintain our present lifestyles. We are trained to treat symptoms and avoid recognizing the problems. This is especially evident with Western cultures when compared to other people of the world. Conclusion: There is no safe plastic. Lies, deceptions, and omissions are and have been a part of the popular mass media for at least the last 50 years. It is nothing new. Its occurrence and magnitude is rapidly increasing with the likes of the present Bush administration. Remaining complacent about it only feeds its growth. It is impossible to have an inkling of an idea of what is truly happening in the world today if ones source is the popular media—CBS, NBC, PBS, NY Times, and so on. They all have something to contribute, but the problems are not worth overlooking in order to be an informed US citizen. One must dig deeper. Consider what person or entity owns those sources of information. The tentacles of corporate-speak and greed run deep. Integrity is lost to the illusion of technology and its promise of making life easier and longer. Until corporate financing of political campaigns and politicians is halted, there will be no truth. Our government must be unplugged from the source of most of our problems. And our eyes and minds must be open to reality—and not the reality of movies. That reality is that the fate of all humans, as well as all other life on Earth, is intricately bound together. Most of the checks and balances have been overcome by the sheer magnitude of the human footprint, causing the rapid degradation and extinction of the very life that human life depends upon. Come out of denial or die. Those are the alternatives. There are no others. Write to Paul at and the message will be passed on. Further reading:
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In journalism, inventing facts and sources is clearly a fundamental violation, the breaking of a covenant between a publication and its readers. Witness last week's resignations of New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd in the wake of the Blair case.
But is that covenant truly sacred to the public?
This, after all, is a culture that has come to accept and even expect skewed information at best, outright lies at worst, in everything from government to advertising to art. A generation after Watergate and Vietnam, scandals that made truth a casualty have lost their power to scandalize. We live in a society of widespread duplicity and deceit.
The Blair commentary has covered the spectrum from grave introspection to indifferent yawns. But pull back a few steps from all the sermons, hand- wringing and jokes, and there may be a broader and more nuanced view of this latest desecration of the public trust. Perhaps, in a postmodern world that is increasingly comfortable with irony, ambiguity, relativism and doubt, we simply no longer believe it's possible to distinguish fiction definitively from fact, lies from truth.
In many ways, it seems, the culture confirms it by reveling in falsehood. Television is awash in reality shows that could hardly be more contrived. You say "Joe Millionaire" is penniless? Oh, well, on to next week's episode.
Authors openly blur the borders between fiction and fact. Art forgers ply their age-old trade with sophisticated new tools. Many are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration lied about the justifications for waging war in Iraq.
At the movies, "The Matrix Reloaded" picks up the premise of the 1999 smash "The Matrix," that real-life experience itself may all be a computerized, virtual-reality ruse. "Matrix" madness, in all its giddy science fiction exuberance, reflects a genuine uncertainty about the verifiable meaning of almost anything.
Seen one way, these are alarming trends. Each new revelation—whether it's insider trading, the pedophilia coverup in the Roman Catholic Church, the bald-faced lies of tobacco company executives under oath or the latest case of plagiarism by some respected scholar—only confirms a cynical view that nothing can be taken as reliable or valid.
But the picture of a hopelessly compromised world where nothing can be trusted is too pat. We all know instinctively, from swimming in the culture's stream of spin-doctored information, half-truths and manipulated imagery, that uncertainty about what we can know and how we know it is inevitable.
REALLY VIRTUAL REALITY?
It's no wonder that virtual reality, technology's operative oxymoron, is so alluring now. By playfully submitting to the notion that something can be both real and fabricated at the same time, we acknowledge our provisional, contextual notion of the truth.
Deception is so pervasive today it almost feels authentic to us. Lies, from the skillfully subtle to the blatantly stage-managed, flow around us all the time. We co-opt them by going along and trying to unpack the deeper truths inside.
Knowing that the colors or perspective in a photograph have been altered in its digital processing, for example, doesn't necessarily undermine the photograph's integrity. It may, in fact, offer a different and deeper kind of pleasure, by drawing attention to the nature of perception and how the act of seeing can transform objective reality.
'CONSIDER THE SOURCE'
"Consider the source," in politics, science or art, is not the same message as, "Disregard the information." Whether it's Matt Drudge, the latest diet, a photography exhibition, computer-enhanced music or a New York Times story, considering the source means just that—understanding the source's qualities,
intentions, limitations and inevitable failings as an integral component of what it has to offer. A big part of what we know is knowing where it came from and why.
Lying is as old as humankind. St. Augustine described it as "a statement at variance with the mind." Aristotle and Kant both maintained that lying was never ethically sanctioned, while Plato made exceptions for doctors and statesmen (the first "national security" clause).
Shakespeare, like artists through the ages, recognized the dual nature of dissembling. "The truest poetry," he wrote, "is the most feigning." For the writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, "The matters I relate are true lies." As poet Arthur Rimbaud put it, with intentional grammatical elusiveness, "I is somebody else."
ART AS A FABRICATION
All art, in a sense, is a lie, a complex fabrication of illusions, symbols and signifiers that creates an alternate reality. For centuries, before the notion of authorship and individual creation took hold, that enterprise was a collective one. Artists told each other's stories, completed paintings sketched by a master or mimicked another musician's tunes.
But the marketplace—the commercial force that drives us today—changed the stakes. It put lies on sale.
Forgery—lying made physically manifest—only began to flourish when the names, styles and concomitant market values of artists ascended. Since then, everything from Vermeers to Van Goghs to Etruscan artifacts have been successfully forged and palmed off on major museums. Celebrated literary forgeries include "lost" Shakespeare plays, the Hitler Diaries and Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes "autobiography."
According to Renee Dreyfus, curator of ancient art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, forgery remains a thriving concern today. "There are a great many fakes and forgeries out there and very hard to discover," she says. "Forgers have gotten so good at what they do."
Credulity plays a crucial role as well. Dreyfus remembers seeing the Getty Museum's celebrated kouros back in the early 1980s and longing, with other curators, that an ancient Greek statue that beautifully preserved might also be authentic. Even when her instincts told her that "a surface that wonderful just didn't ring true."
"When something looks too good to be true," as she says, "it often isn't true."
MEETING EXPECTATIONS
Blair and Stephen Glass, the young writer fired from the New Republic magazine five years ago for concocting stories, were journalistic forgers—and they played on that same kind of yearning for belief.
Yes, they were cunning, determined and took great pains to cover their tracks with editors, colleagues and fact checkers. They had their own private motives, of self-interest, ambition or self-destructive pathology, for doing what they did.
But, consciously or not, they also exploited a wish to be told something that was just too good to be true. They told stories the readers were not only willing to buy, but stories readers wanted to buy.
Janet Malcolm, a journalist who has written extensively on the nature of truth in nonfiction, argues that although we may be obliged to take a novelist's, playwright's or poet's word on faith, "we are almost always free to doubt the biographer's or the autobiographer's or the historian's or the journalist's. . . . Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open."
That shouldn't be taken as some sort of justification for what Blair, Glass or other fabricators do. Malcolm isn't addressing the willful misrepresentation, distortion or invention of facts engaged in by these malefactors. But she does make a salient point worth remembering about fact- based work.
Any piece of nonfiction is by its nature a refraction, an intrinsically limited version, of the truth. The writer's observations, selection of detail and emphasis, inevitable biases and blind spots, diction, tone and word choice all construct a reality that can be, at best, parallel to any objective truth (assuming such a thing exists).
A BOOK OF TWISTS AND MIRRORS
In "Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir" (2000), Lauren Slater enacts Malcolm's themes with a fascinating, maddening spin on autobiographical veracity. "I exaggerate," goes the entire text of the first chapter. From there Slater recounts her harrowing battle with epilepsy, only to concede that she may not have had the disease at all. Even the author of the book's introduction, a University of Southern California professor of philosophy, is apparently faked.
Admitting her "slipperiness," says Slater, is a kind of honesty. She tempts the reader: "I am inviting you to enter the confusion with me."
Glass summons readers into his own hall of mirrors in "The Fabulist," his novel about his fall from journalistic grace. By employing fiction's license to fabricate, while preserving his real name as the protagonist, Glass plays a teasing game of confession and concealment.
If there is one truth "The Fabulist" reveals, it's that Glass' lies worked because they fulfilled readers' and editors' own built-in biases and expectations about his subjects.
A PLEA FOR HONESTY
In her 1978 best-seller "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life," Sissela Bok urged institutions—government, corporations, universities, law and medicine—to help banish deceit. "Trust and integrity are precious resources," she wrote, "easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity."
Bok's plea came at a time freshly bruised and sobered by Watergate and Vietnam. But in a day where truth has become a seriously endangered species, her faith in institutional reform seems almost quaintly distant.
Indeed, the most striking thing about fabrications at the New York Times or skepticism about Bush's as yet unproven claims about Iraq may be how little those things actually surprise or disillusion the public.
It's not that people always expect or blindly tolerate lies. They simply recognize, in this disorienting day and age, how difficult it is to know anything for sure.
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