I've been more than a bit obsessed of late with the nature of deceit, likely because
we live in a culture in which we find deceit omnipresent, so much so that we’ve
come to expect it—in our politicians and government, in our corporations (in
their actions, bookkeeping, and advertising), on our food labels, within the
films and programs and books with which we like to entertain ourselves. I’m more
than a guilty participant, and that is the larger reason for my obsession. I am
a novelist. The word “fiction”, by which I make my living, comes to us from the
Old French “ficcion” meaning “something invented” and originates in Latin, with
roots meaning “to build, form or knead.” Moreover, I have written under a pseudonym
for twenty-five years, so I guess that functions as a kind of lying inside of
lying. So why should you trust me? You shouldn't.
But
then you know that, don’t you? You know enough not to confuse the fabrications
of a novel with reality. What troubles me, however, is that collectively we
seem to have an increasingly difficult time separating out the lies we are told
by those with substantial agendas requiring we accept such lies from the actual
truth of facts. This, despite coming of age in a culture where we should know
better, a culture where those trying to sell us things have been appealing to
our vulnerabilities—our desires and our fears—all of our lives. As a teacher, I've worked hard to help students develop the critical thinking skills to
differentiate truth from fiction in their everyday lives. Often, even among the
brightest, it is an uphill battle.
At this moment, I am thinking of one student
specifically. She was smart, scored well on tests, found acceptance into a good
college, pulled in above average grades. Yet she aggressively claimed the
position in a class discussion that there clearly was no harm caused to local
communities by the presence of nearby large-scale oil and gas development. She had,
after all, gone the extra mile most never do (or have the chance to do) and was
a participant on a class field trip to a natural gas development site. She’d
been shown around, had the process explained, saw completed drill sites, and was
shown the public works facilities, such as a joint school district and
community aquatic center that contributions from natural resource companies had
helped finance, as had tax profits from oil and gas development. She refused,
however, to see that the fact her tour had been led entirely by a public
relations official from the company might have provided an incomplete picture
of the impact, just as if seeing the neat, fenced pumping station told the
whole picture of the process by how gas is brought to the surface. What she saw
was real, after all. But she failed to talk to the police officers who had seen
a 300% rise in domestic violence calls in the years during the most active gas
field development, or the high school principal who lamented the spike in teen
pregnancies in students who had briefly dated oil field workers, or the bank
manager who made more money from her side job on Friday and Saturday nights
than she did making now non-existent loans to locals, no more than she had
investigated the warnings now frequently issued by the state for poor air
quality conditions, something non-existent in a rural place prior to
development. Now had she also had these conversations, she still might have
reached her original conclusion (after, one hopes, some real investigation) and
certainly she would have seen that taken alone, no one such piece of data offered
irrefutable evidence, no more than her carefully controlled tour had. My
concern as a teacher was not with the opinion she held but with the fact she
had left so many questions unasked. When we fail to ask the questions critical thinking
demands of us, we become guilty participants in propagating deception.
In
imagining the story of Aaron Lugner in my novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow, I trace the actions of a man who has
been living entirely by deceit for a decade, trying on entire false identities,
profiting from the interest of women, and running scams that gain financial
profit by appealing to the vulnerabilities and vanities of others. But I’m even
more interested, in Aaron and in all the characters of the novel, in the nature
of self-deceit, those ways in which we delude ourselves about our own natures.
I’m interested in large part because I think we are all guilty participants.
Indeed, I’m not certain any of us could quite make it through our individual
difficult lives without a little self-deceit, for don’t we all, at the very
least, possess rather selective memories? Ask three people who were all present
at the same event twenty years ago for their recollections and tell me you
won’t get three different stories. Cobbled together they may reflect some
proximity of the truth. We can argue that this is merely a matter of differing
perspectives and faulty, aging brain wiring, and that would be right, of course,
but isn’t the way we remember also guided in part by how we wish to remember
and shaped by psychological forces we don’t fully understand? I would argue
that is partly a measure of self-deceit, though not necessarily an unhealthy
one. I suspect it is difficult, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, not
to be deceiving in one’s perception of oneself about such ordinary and
inescapable things as the way we view our waistlines and our hairlines. Part of
this is even a biological function. After all, how many women would face a
second (or third or fourth…) round of childbirth if they weren’t able to shape
selective memory about the pain of the first one, supplanting physical pain
with the joy of new life?
The
novel does not focus entirely on these normal measures of self-deceit but
rather more extraordinary ones, for Aaron is a character that begins to believe
he may be creating realities by the lies he tells. But then I would argue that
America, collectively, is guilty of something similar, often too willing to
accept the lies we have knowingly participated in creating. How else did we,
with notable opposition from those who did not buy in, accept the self-delusion
that our involvement in Vietnam was to protect Southeast Asia from communism,
to keep the world safe for democracy? How
else do we continue to boast that we remain the most advanced nation in the
world when a 2012 Pearson report ranks the US 17th in a global
educational index based on student graduation rates, test performance, and
pursuit of college admission; when our infant mortality rate of 5.9 deaths per
1,000 live births places us behind not just most of Europe but behind countries
like Cuba, Taiwan, and Slovenia; and when we are ranked as the 18th
most obese nation in the world? How else do we accept presenting ourselves as a
model for democracy when our own Congress is barely functioning and represents
the interests of lobbyists rather than those of their constituents (and we are
certainly lying to ourselves if we believe differently)?
In the Chameleon’s Shadow never enters the realms of deceit,
self or otherwise, with a political eye. It is a story about people and about
their individual decisions, not their political ones. But its writing was
everywhere informed by the geopolitical arena of lying, for the bulk of the
novel was written at the height of the most recent recession, at that time when,
even as it was still unfolding, collectively American consciousness was rapidly
forgetting the lies of the Bush administration that had carried us into war and
those that had created tax policy and stripped regulation to ensure that the
wealthiest in the society (and the biggest campaign contributors—though now, in
the age of the Citizens United ruling such contributions not only flow directly
through corporations but unchecked through interest groups in a purposeful,
deceptive attempt to hide individuals) grew richer. Is it self-deceit to fail
acknowledgment that since 1979 the incomes of the middle 60% of Americans have
grown 38% while the incomes of those in the top1% of income brackets have seen
277% growth, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office? It is a useful
reminder that the wealth gap between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest
of us reached a peak in 2007 and mirrored, almost exactly, a peak recorded in
1928,the latter immediately followed of course by the Great Depression, the
former triggering the recession from which we are still struggling to recover
despite its technical end. By 2009 and 2010, the years during which most of my
novel was written, we were fully aware of the consequences of the enormous,
collaborative lie that generated the mortgage crisis. And what is it but a
confluence of self-deceit and purposeful deceit to sell people homes they could
not afford, financed by loans they could not pay and based on appraisals that
were pure fictions for the purpose of packaging such loans to inflate a market
that was, in itself, essentially a fiction.
As
banks failed and the Bush administration initiated policies to bail them out,
we watched CEOs line their pockets, something we have already clearly chosen to
forget, which begs the question whether this habit is a symptom of cultural ADD
or self-deceit or both. It is this myopia that troubles me most, for
immediately the blame shifted to the Obama administration as we quickly and
conveniently chose to forget the circumstances and policies that created the
nightmare President Obama inherited. Instead we saw the rise of movements like
the Tea Party, which steadfastly likes to believe—and I do accept that many,
even a majority of its participants actually do believe—that it is a grassroots
movement, quietly ignoring or choosing to remain ignorant of the fact that it
has been bankrolled almost exclusively by members of the ruling class, most
notably by David and Charles Koch through donations to groups such as
“Americans for Prosperity”, “FreedomWorks” and others. Everyone has a right to
his or her agenda, including the Koch brothers, but I can’t tolerate the kind
of self-deceit masked either as simple ignorance or total lack of critical
thinking ability that allows so many Tea Party members to view their agenda as
one developed and funded by “the people” to represent hard-working, ordinary
Americans.
Similarly,
is it not likely that public figures with microphones are disproportionate to
the larger population in their sham suggestions that climate change is a hoax?
Consider this as illustrated by Congressman Steve Stockman’s (R-TX) words: “The
new fad thing that’s going through America and around the world. It’s called
global warming.”? Or that they are
completely off track in their understanding, like the fearless Speaker of the
House John Boehner (R-OH), explaining: “Every cow in the world, you know, when
they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.” How long will we allow a
tiny minority of either the self-protective, profit-motivated or the entirely
ignorant continue to deny the careful and well-documented research on climate
change? Do they even understand the nature of scientific inquiry? Are those who
continue to deny the science guilty of purposeful lying or of self-deception?
Either way, the inaction promoted by such absurd claims only help to delay
movement towards solutions, and either way, who pays?
It
is a similar surreptitious methodology based in denial and lies that has helped
form a near single point of focus by conservatives over the past election cycle
and into the next on the deficit. Now no one in their right mind is going to
suggest carrying huge deficits is any way to fund a great country and no one
should deny that its presence must be addressed. That said, common sense also
suggests that in a time of significant recession, high unemployment, two wars, and
in the presence of a crumbling infrastructure that largely has not been
addressed in over a half century is not the ideal moment to pitch an all or
nothing battle on the deficit. Now this is all the more in evidence when so
many actually appear to believe in the calculated deception of forgetting where
most of the deficit came from. Isn't it convenient to forget that the last large deficit experienced in America had much of its root in Reagan tax policy
and the folly of trickle-down economics and was erased in a time of prosperity
and growth during the Clinton administration when deficit was transformed to
surplus? And while I and others would be equally guilty of practicing deception
if I did not acknowledge the significant growth in the deficit during the Obama
administration, it is silly to remove such growth from the facts of the
surrounding economics. This is equally true of the last acts of the Bush
administration and the actions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, for
that occurred in a time of unprecedented economic freefall and to fail action
would likely have exaggerated the problems. To view that and the current
deficit growth outside the context of the very recent history is simply stupid.
But it would be equally mindless to fail to recognize the policy decisions that
helped create the terrain in which such catastrophes occurred, as it is
inaccurate to falsely represent the impact of such spending when compared to
the other choices that account for the bulk of the deficit. (And if you want to
deal in those pesky little things called facts, when examining the years after
2008, it might be revealing to recognize that spending on TARP, Medicare Part
D, and The Recovery Act COMBINED do not equal expenditures on the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars, and pale when compared to the 2001 and 2003 Tax cuts.) There
was an extremely readable and useful chart reprinted in The Atlantic (originally from the New York Times) that helps clarify a visual reminder of the truth
about deficit growth and its sources, and to place it in the same context I
attempt here, it is useful to quote from the accompanying article:
“It's based on data from the
Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its
significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but
intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being
very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of
consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit,
namely the Bush-era tax cuts.”
And
consider this statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
"If not for the Bush tax cuts,
the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst
recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’
actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near
term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion
in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus
law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at
that time."
While
not the largest single contributor to the deficit, consider these boggling
numbers from an article from March 2013 in the Washington Post: “The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost
taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of
wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a
decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.” And,
remembering that the war in Iraq was based either on a complete absence of analytic logic or an outright lie, let’s ask the questions: what did American men and women give up their lives and limbs to accomplish? Is Iraq a more
stable place today than it was prior to our invasion? Will we exit Afghanistan
and leave it any less corrupt or any less tribal than have the countless
foreign armies who have fought there before? Have we made more new enemies and
created more future terrorists than we removed? Are the geopolitics of the
larger region more or less stable today than they were before ten years of war?
And who, overwhelmingly, serves our country in such wars, members of the top 1%
of income brackets or those of the bottom 10%?
The
answers to such questions, like the realities beneath who sets the Tea Party
agenda and those who deny climate change suggest to me that, collectively, we
are extremely adept at self-deception and easy marks for those who wish to
deceive us with purpose.
And
such is the larger domestic atmosphere prevalent in the years spent writing In the Chameleon’s Shadow. The book touches on none of these, but I hold by novelist
Ishmael Reed’s belief that “writers cannot write outside of history.” Aaron
Lugner, the protagonist of the novel, came entirely as a surprise to me. I
don’t honestly know why I stumbled upon his story during this writing, for the
book has its genesis only in a visual image that opens the novel. The rest of
the writing, as it typically is for me, was simply trying to catch up to the
people who populated the fringes of that image. But can any of us live outside
the history of our times? In hindsight, it is not so terribly surprising to
have found myself writing a novel preoccupied with the themes of deceit. So
while the novel is not political, it is ideological, and one of the central
questions the book ended up exploring is this: “Is not answering the question
that has never been asked a kind of lying?”
I
think it is an intriguing question in its own right, not only prevalent to the
relationships within the novel but as a larger question for our lives. We all
edit. Even in the age of social media and an overage of sharing, we pick and
choose what we reveal, and honestly, it seems to me that increasingly people
are so busy making such choices about what is revealed that by and large we are
not very good at asking questions any more. This leaves a lot of room for
non-disclosure or partial disclosure and comes in an age when we are
extraordinarily aware of the images, public and otherwise, we wish to
broadcast. If we fail to ask the question, can we ever expect an answer? And if
we are carefully crafting a public face, how much of that portrait is rooted in
truth and how much in a partial illusion guided by self-deception?
What
I do feel strongly is that when we take such ideas back into the collective of
the larger culture, our ability to be deceived, by the self or by others, is
rooted in our lack of asking the difficult questions. We live in an age where
we are skeptical of smart people yet fail to critically review the most
omnipresent parts of our lives. We listen to pundits when we should be
conversing with scientists. We watch fabricated television and call it
“reality” and pretend to be shocked when its participants prove to have little
relationship to the personalities (characters?) they portray. We allow the
wealthy elite to set the country’s agenda and then pacify ourselves in the
belief that they are looking out for our best interests. We accept the mission
taglines of corporations as truth. We need to ask more questions. We need to
question our representatives, our corporations, and ourselves. If we fail to
ask the questions, we are guilty of passively accepting a camouflage of lies.
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