A FEW MISPLACED WORDS: MARILYN PENN
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A FEW MISPLACED WORDS: MARILYN PENN
There may have been a time when shame held sway in public life, when exposed wrongdoers resigned in disgrace, hung their heads or at least pretended to be mortified. That time is no longer. The offender du jour, Richard Blumenthal, attorney general and senatorial candidate of Connecticut has been revealed as a man who feigned military service in Vietnam on several occasions and implied that he was a returning veteran, subject to society’s abuse at the end of the war. Connecticut’s chief guardian of the law classifies these fabrications and misrepresentations as misplaced words which he had merely misspoken in referring to his service. He claims to take full responsibility for this but by continuing to fudge the nature of his lie, he in fact, is taking none. By insisting that he will not allow these few instances of misspeaking to impugn his service to his country, he misses the point. It is not his service as a Marine Reserve that is being questioned – it’s his veracity or the lack therof; it’s the nature of a character that would lie, then squirm out of a tight spot with arrogance instead of contrite admission.
But Blumenthal is just the most recent and hardly the worst offender among contemporary politicians. Almost everyone in office in Albany in the past few years has lied and/or committed other crimes of corruption: Hevesi, Bruno, Spitzer, Paterson – these are just the headliners but lesser luminaries have abounded. Add Al Sharpton and Charlie Rangel to the list of New York malfeasants who, despite overwhelming evidence of their misdeeds, will look you straight in the eye and deny, deny, deny. Most of our presidents in the past half century have lied about something but Bill Clinton shines for the grandstanding of his finger-wagging the nation on camera, insisting that he did not have sex with that woman, as we watched his nose grow longer and redder by the second. Clinton also proved that if a politician is thick-skinned enough to outlast his accusers and temporary public disdain, he can woo his way back to admiration, leave office with the highest approval rating of any president since World War II and attain the ultimate status of multi-millionaire elder statesman.
This is America where every man can create his own identity, unfettered by the constraints of a class society and unmoored by the myriad possibilities of new beginnings. Adam Wheeler, undoubtedly a politician in training, has been charged with 20 criminal counts in Massachusetts for having lied and forged his way into Harvard while accepting $50,000 worth of scholarship aid. This 23 year old student, undaunted by his suspension from Bowdoin for academic dishonesty, transferred to Harvard and might not have been caught had he not also plagiarized his submission for a Rhodes scholarship. This precipitated his withdrawal from Harvard, application for transfer to Yale and the ultimate intervention by his parents in their son’s spiraling life of deception. (Wheeler may have been modeling himself after another student, dismissed from Harvard for cheating, subsequently reinstated and later found cheating and lying again at Chappaquidick. He too had the requisite skin for turning into a silver-haired elder statesman)
One of our national myths concerns George Washington and the cherry tree with the concluding heroic admission that our boy could not tell a lie. Though apocryphal, it’s important to note that George didn’t say he couldn’t misspeak. In the days before truth became relative, dependent on whose narrative it is, there was consensus on the difference between telling the truth and lying. Post-modern deconstruction did away with that cornball notion so that now, people lie as they always have since the days when Cain asserted he had no idea where his brother was. What has changed is that no public liar seems embarrassed anymore and a pompous attorney general seeking election as senator can self-righteously propound that he only misspoke some of the time, thereby deserving that his reputation remain untarnished by so vague and slippery a concept as the truth
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