taylorandayumi, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
When my partner, Shel, and I were first dating forty-plus years ago, we were enamored with a string of inexpensive and delicious Indian restaurants that spanned the entire block of East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village in Manhattan.
One day Shel noticed that the printing for all the restaurant menus was exactly the same. “Have you ever been around the corner on East 5th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A?” I asked him. When he told me he hadn’t, I said, “There’s a whole string of print shops there that print the menus for the Indian restaurants.”
“Oh, that’s odd,” he said. And I burst out laughing, amazed that he believed my jokey little lie.
True confession: I have “a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies.” It’s one of the innate qualities John Gardner writes about in On Becoming a Novelist that I value in myself as a fiction writer. My mind is always trying to churn up believable story lines. That’s why I love coming up with pretexts when planning surprise parties for other people, even though, as an introvert, I hate surprise parties when the surprise is on me.
My lies have generally been harmless, safely ensconced in their fictional blankets, or quickly revealed as untruths, once I’ve made the joke or unveiled the surprise. But I also need to own up to the “white lies” I’ve told–or might tell –n situations when full honesty might be more hurtful to the person I’m talking to, and, yes, to the lies I told as a teenager in order to do things my parents would have never let me do. While I’m not necessarily proud of having told those falsehoods, I do admit that I enjoyed making up the details, even then.
And some lies–like the recent story about immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets, are NOT harmless, even as most of us might laugh at such incredulity, I can’t help but think of the propaganda Hitler and the Nazis disseminated about Jews, way before the Holocaust started. In writings, films, newspaper articles, political cartoons, Jews were consistently portrayed as subhuman creatures. As early as 1919, Hitler said, “the ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.” At that time, when Jews in Germany were largely secular and assimilated into German society, it might have been easy to brush off that comment as the ravings of a racist–but look what happened!
Trump has made deporting undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his platform. And in the debate last night, he kept hammering the falsehood that all these immigrants were criminals, when in fact, the number of crimes committed by immigrants in this country is far lower than the number of crimes committed by native born Americans. Then he drove in more nails by repeating the crazy message about immigrants eating cats. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but it’s also a way of subtle brainwashing, depicting these people as so different from ourselves that we can no longer feel empathy for them or connect human-to-human.
Unfortunately, there will be people who believe Trump’s lies. And there may not be not be anyone around who can own up to the falsehood and quickly reorient them to the truth. As a Jew, an immigrant justice activist, and a writer, this has led me to contemplate my own love of lies. Have they all been harmless? Have I lied “ethically” and is there such a thing as “lying ethically?” Have I told the truth, even during the times I twisted or exaggerated “facts” to put the frosting on a good story? I’ve always felt, like author Madeleine L’Engle, that truth and fact are not always the same thing, something Shel and I disagree on, since he’s always correcting my stories with more accurate numerical and geographical detail–which I find highly annoying.
When we debriefed the Indian restaurant/print shop story, I told Shel I was surprised he could be so gullible. In response, he said, “I had no reason why I shouldn’t trust you.” It was a sobering moment. As writers, we do ask for our readers’ trust. There’s a truth nestled inside whatever fiction we might spew that we want our audience to believe and resonate with. That means we have a responsibility not to tell lies that have the potential to harm, no matter how innocuous or ridiculous they might appear on the surface, or how much we might enjoy telling them.