Philanthropy Through Lies, Or, The False Memoir

Few have been able to escape recent discussion of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea and its inaccuracies/lies/libel, and likely much more insightful things have been said than I will produce here, partially because I must admit that I have not read Three Cups of Tea and did not intend to either before or after the scandal. If you want accurate information about the story you can find it here or here or here. I do have some things to say about the purposes of lying, however, and I also wonder what my readers think. Mortenson's book, about founding schools for girls in Afghanistan, has helped his foundation, also created to run schools in Afghanistan, raise millions of dollars. In order to help sell his book, Mortenson apparently made up a story about being nursed back to health by Afghani villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2. Or perhaps you would like me to rephrase: in order to raise awareness about the need for schools for girls in Afghanistan, Mortenson embellished a story about the kindness of strangers and overestimated the number of schools formed out of his life-altering experience. It is undoubtedly true that Mortenson has worked to found schools in Afghanistan, many of them for girls, so should we care that he wasn't nursed to health or kidnapped by Taliban?

It's difficult to say. Perhaps the whole issue should be a matter of where money is currently going and how effectively it is forming and maintaining schools. My blog is not about philanthropy, however; it is about lies. People lie, embellish, exaggerate, falsify, and prevaricate "for good" all the time, and in many cases we just assume it is happening. Is Greg Mortenson's dishonesty worse than James Frey's, for instance, because Frey only duped Oprah and got millions of people to buy a really crappy book, while Mortenson acquired actual money on potentially false pretenses? Is the main issue money, then? Should we distinguish among who lies to us in what contexts for what goals?

Is Fraud Funny?

Yesterday I read about a man in the Los Angeles area who scammed Chinese immigrants out of hundreds of dollars each by telling them they could join a special group of the U.S. Army. This article from the L.A. Times discusses the situation and the case against David Deng in a very serious way, emphasizing its deleterious effects on both unsuspecting immigrants and the military; it even mentions that Deng "was also charged with possession of child pornography," further pointing to the serious badness of the scam artist. However, I read the article from Reuters first, and although there are few major differences between the information the two impart, something about the Reuters article made me laugh. Perhaps it was this statement: "Deng, 51, allegedly gave his 'recruits' military uniforms, had them parade in a Los Angeles suburb and took them to the decommissioned USS Midway aircraft carrier, which is a museum in San Diego." I feel for the poor duped immigrants, but there is some humor in imagining a suburban parade of the men and women pictured above.

My conflicted feelings about the story lead me to question both news reportage and whether fraud can be funny. The L.A. Times paints this particular fraud as a horrible trick on impoverished immigrants with little to no knowledge of English, while the Reuters article seems to focus on the spectacle of the situation more than on its impact on those involved. I often express outrage toward those who commit fraud because they prey on those who assume people to be honest, but sometimes it is easier to laugh at the people who are so easily tricked. Fraud, like counterfeit (see Derrida), can be seen to not exist until it is discovered (and subsequently loses its power), and only those who "discover" the fraud, who divest it of its power, can really laugh at the people who were duped. I think that laughing at conmen and fraud puts us in the position of discoverer, which both absolves us of the conman's guilt and makes us intellectually superior to those conned. I don't think those Chinese "soldiers" are laughing at all.

On "Fakery"

The front page of today's New York Times features the headline "Qaddafi Fakery, Still Revealing," leading me to consider the increasingly widespread use of a word I consider only marginally legitimate. The Oxford English Dictionary lists "fakery" within the second definition of the verb "fake," itself considered slang, and the first printed use of the word "fakery" was not until 1887. "Fake" in its use as a noun has a much longer history, but even its etymological origins are unclear. In the seventeenth century, the word seems to have been a synonym for "fold," but how it evolved into its current definition (only in existence since the late 18th century) can only be guessed at. Might we go as far as to say that the work "fake" was made up, itself faked? Perhaps I move too far away from reality with that conjecture, but the point is

"If you don't believe that "fakery" is a word, why is it the title of your blog?" you may ask. I consider The Fakery to be a place where falsifications are cooked up and ruminated on, a sort of fake bakery, if you will. That the word "fakery" itself has questionable origins only aids the cause of sussing out and expounding on the false, I think. I could have called this blog the "Bunco Bakery," but how many people really know what "bunco" is? I welcome your commentary on this subject.

American Sham

From Frank Norris's The Octopus:

"It was the Fake, the eternal, irrepressible Sham; glib, nimble, ubiquitous, tricked out in all the paraphernalia of imposture, an endless defile of charlatans that passed interminably before the gaze of the city, marshalled by 'lady presidents,' exploited by clubs of women, by literary societies, reading circles, and culture organisations. The attention the Fake received, the time devoted to it, the money which it absorbed, were incredible. It was all one that impostor after impostor was exposed; it was all one that the clubs, the circles, the societies were proved beyond doubt to have been swindled. The more the Philistine press of the city railed and guyed, the more the women rallied to the defence of their protégé of the hour. That their favourite was persecuted, was to them a veritable rapture. Promptly they invested the apostle of culture with the glamour of a martyr."

Setting aside this passage's mysogyny, there's something strangely timely about it. I see today's reality television, fake memoirs, and religious telethons in this passage written over one hundred years ago. Has America changed very much since then?