On Admiration

From The Recognitions:

"--But if Mister Feddle saw a copy of a play by Ibsen, if he loves The Wild Duck and wishes he had written it, he wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of . . . recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?"

Language of Falsehood

Recently read in Emerson's Nature:

"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, the desire of pleasure, the desire of power, the desire of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections."

There is something just right about this statement.

Who is Hurt by the Liar?

Recently a friend and I discussed whether fabrication that was not "malicious" could be acceptable. She argued that perhaps a false story could be told as fact if it were entertaining and hurt no one. Indeed, we all read fictional books and watch fictional television shows, often ones "based on a true story," so does it matter whether the events happened to the storyteller or not, or even whether they happened to anyone, provided they are entertaining? Is there a great difference, ultimately, between falsehood and truth, and is truth very important anyway?

One could argue that Bethany Storro, pictured, hurt no one but herself when she told authorities that a stranger had thrown acid on her face when she, in fact threw acid on her own face for unknown reasons (though an interview on Oprah could be one). We could laugh at her stupidity or her desperate need for attention and forget about her. However, a few days after Storro's much-publicized "attack," a woman in Arizona was actually attacked with acid, apparently the victim of a copycat attacker. Storro is not the first person to be attacked in this manner, but she is one of the few whose stories have been aired on Good Morning America. In addition to throwing various innocent Washington women under suspicion, the faker's story appears to have lead directly to a real crime. The stories we tell don't have to be true, but we should be very wary of assuming that a lie will hurt no one simply because it has no malicious intent. Storro's intent may not be clear, but the consequences of her actions certainly are.

Forensic Fraud

I'm a big fan of those procedural forensic shows, the ones where the coroner or CSI or detective finds a bruising pattern or a cut or a bite mark that proves that the next-door neighbor really did kill the rude anthropologist, after all. I know that most of the science and technology in them is exaggerated, if not outright impossible, but it is nice to imagine that we could have the tools to almost always correctly identify the lawbreaker. That's why I was particularly drawn to this story wherein a man was convicted of arson, rape, and murder mostly based on the testimony of dentist Michael West, who claimed that teeth marks on the body matched those of a (mass-manufactured denture wearing) suspect. As the article explains,

West, who once claimed he could trace the tooth marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich at a crime scene to a defendant while excluding everyone else on the planet, has had to resign from two professional forensics organizations due to his habit of giving testimony unsupported by science.

West appears to be more or less a fraud, a man who dubiously matches teeth marks to the mouths of people who are already suspects and takes credit for closing difficult cases. I assume that acclaim drives him to do what he does, but his fraud has both put potentially innocent people on death row and could significantly undermine future use of forensic evidence in criminal trials. Does the dentist operate based on some thwarted sense of justice? Does he just "know" that suspects are guilty, and therefore fudges the evidence to put them in prison? Or does he disregard the suspects' plights altogether, wishing simply for congratulations for having solved a crime? Perhaps he's just trying to add some glamor to dentistry. I am no expert on this subject, of course, but neither do I claim to be.

On Narcissism and Liars

This is the story of Brian Blackwell, a 19-year-old man (or should I even say boy?) who told his friends he was a professional tennis player and brutally killed his parents when they discovered he had fraudulently opened and used credit cards in their names. He admitted to "manslaughter with diminished responsibility," claiming that his Narcissistic Personality Disorder diminished his responsibility. As this 2005 article discusses, "Blackwell's personality disorder meant he fantasised about unlimited success, power and brilliance" and he resorted to murder when his fantasy began to crumble.

It seems that nothing about Brian Blackwell's life was quite the truth, until he really, truly murdered his parents and then went on vacation with his girlfriend using their stolen credit cards. Is the liar's truth the lie he makes others believe, or the reality only he knows? It almost seems as though his lies about himself became so profound that he was no longer held accountable for his real actions, as though those were made untrue as well. Blackwell was the first person to use Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a criminal defense, and I wonder to what extent he opened the floodgates for others like him. Should Blackwell's actions get more leniency than those of criminals who aren't compelled to lie, who kill for money, or food, or love? Are his fantasies less controllable than others' avarice, gluttony, or lust?

Forget "Born with It"

I've begun watching television for the first time in seven years, and while there is a motherlode of fakeness on TV about which to write, few shows or advertisements have announced to their own deception as loudly as Maybelline's "Falsies" mascara, which purports to make your real lashes look like false ones. Woman has moved, then, from wanting to look like "maybe she's born with it" to wishing to look like she's got fake facial alterations. Are we to celebrate the fake now, embracing artifice and shunning the genuine? Is anyone attracted to the woman on the left solely because her eyelashes are enormous-looking?

Teach Your Children Well

The "Google alert" I have set up for the words "forgery" and "impostor" give me hundreds of news articles every week, and I don't even begin to read all of them. Most involve forged checks and forged legal documents on a minor scale, and the perpetrators are usually sentenced to two or so years of prison, depending on the charge. The stories I find more interesting are those that don't involve literally making money, but have more subtle ends. In "Qatar's top-selling English language daily newspaper" I found this story about a teacher/father's forgery of his children's documents to be accepted into a PRIMARY school in England. Perhaps my public school education makes me especially disdainful of this kind of action, but the fact that the story made it to a newspaper in Qatar points to the fact that others must be interested as well. One hears of all kinds of fraud happening at the high school and college level in terms of document falsification and illegal test-taking, but rarely does it happen at the primary school level (as far as I know). I pity this man's children, forced to leave their school because of their father's fraud, unsure whose actions to emulate. I am rarely a "think of the children" kind of person, but I wonder how these kids will learn the value of honesty and hard work, if they can't learn it from their father who is also a teacher.