Long Confidence

Slippery People (live) - Talking Heads (mp3)

It is—or seems to be—a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it.  -- Herman Melville

The con is as old as serpents and fruit, as old as stealing a birthright for soup. Since we first crawled from primordial ooze, we’ve longed to run a fast one on another person. Yet something about the word “con” feels quintessentially American. The first reference to “confidence man” is reportedly from an American criminal trial.

The Confidence Man was Herman Melville's final novel. He published it on the very day the novel’s events were set to occur: April Fool’s Day, 1857. The book is described as a satire, a metaphysical rumination, and the precursor to the modern novel. Melville gave up on fiction writing after it flopped.

Who better to acknowledge the cruel joke of life than Melville? Like so many great artists during their lifetimes, he died all but anonymous. Life, as he so beautifully expressed above, cons us all in one way or another.

America especially loves a crafty liar. The Color of Money and The Sting. Sawyer from LOST. Danny Ocean and his mythical 10 pals. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Catch Me If You Can. Matchstick Men. The Music Man. Paper Moon. Most of David Mamet’s CV.

We love crafty lies, and we romanticize something about con artists. We love feeling like we’re in on the grift even as we become aware that the entire nature of artist and audience is like that of the grifter to the victim.

Do we see something in the con that reminds us of life? Are con job movies and TV characters just a metaphorical and blown-up look into our daily lives? Or, do we watch these films as a kind of cautionary tale, a reminder why we should be happy and satisfied to stay in our vanilla and harmless shiny little boxes? Or, do we simply enjoy movies about karma, since the end result for most grifters is to find themselves grifted, the hustler transformed into the mark?

Most days I think we love con artist characters and con job movies because we find ourselves wondering how much of our own life or situation is an accidental con. How many conversations do we have, private and personal and confessional, where the crux of the subject is “I feel like I’m pulling the wool over their eyes,” or “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this”?

A friend at work was hoodwinked by her boyfriend. They dated almost seven months. He gave her complete access to his Facebook account, complete access to his cell phone, even his email addresses. She met his clearly dysfunctional family. Yet somehow she went seven months before finding out he had been lying about his job and was seeing at least two other women on the side. When he said he was on a business trip to Mexico, he was actually still in town seeing another woman.

In Dallas, a man is recovering from a full face transplant. (Warning: don’t view the link if you’re at all squeamish.) It’s an amazing story of science, but it’s also one more reminder of how much of what we naively consider our “identity” is, in fact, mutable. Your gender, every last bit of your appearance, even every last aspect of your face, can be massively altered in the 21st Century. Meanwhile, in the techno-world, the non-physical things are ever easier to shift and change as well.

A face transplant or a sex change isn’t a con, per se, but it is just one more way the world seems chock full of uncertainty, of shifting sand.

I can’t think of a week that’s gone by since I was in junior high where I didn’t look myself in the mirror at some point and wonder who I was foolin’. My parents thought I was a great kid. My friends thought I was a great friend. My teachers thought I was a great student. My wife. My kids. My pastor. My boss. Anyone whose path I crossed, my darkest thoughts go, probably left with a better impression than I deserved.*

How much wool was (and is) in my possession, that I could pull it over so many eyes, over and over again? How much wool do I have left? Maybe you, dear reader, don’t fret on such things, but I suspect I’m not alone in my paranoia.

In my darkest flashes, I am the Fast Eddie or Sawyer of my own story, fighting to keep the long con from imploding. Each episode comes complete with dramatic, hair-raising moments where someone is on the verge of discovering my deception until I duck into a restroom stall, lift my legs on the seat, and wait anxiously as the footsteps clop and clack on the bathroom tiles.

I sit there, hands against the sides of the stall, not daring to let even a molecule of air escape my lungs, and I hear the click of the gun as it cocks.

Cut to commercial.

All that tension build-up and anticipation just to help Proctor & Gamble sell some detergent. One more con job in our modern world.

* -- The Jonathan Franzen write-up in the NYTimes again gets at this far better than I, but who wants to reference the same guy’s writing twice in a single week??

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Sunshine Lies - Matthew Sweet (mp3)
God's Got It - The Black Crowes (mp3)

A man has a story. The story changes lives. It changes the way entire groups of people deal with situations, with other people, with themselves. It reroutes armies.

But wait.

You begin to realize this story is not entirely true. You begin to realize that the man, the storyteller, knowingly embellished or even fictionalized a portion of this story. And yet, parts of the story remain true, and its telling has unquestionably affected people for good, and its ripple effect of positivity cannot be questioned.

How big must the lies be before they become inexcusable, before the good accomplished is eclipsed by the interwoven acts of deception?

If you think I’m talking about Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea, you’re only partly right. I could also be talking about Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard, or some could even say I’m talking about Jesus Christ himself.

60 Minutes did its expose, complete with damning info from investigative studpuppy Jon Krakauer. It took a few days of follow-up shock in newspapers and blogs, and then the invevitable backlash to the backlash began. If you read the comments section of the 60 Minutes link, a majority of the 376 (and counting) commenters are incensed that the show dared to investigate such a great hero.

That Mortenson has been the central figure in acts that have positively changed the lives of hundreds of people, possibly thousands, is indisputable. But couldn’t the same be said of Scientology? Or Latter Day Saints? Or Christianity?

Sure, we can all talk about how these religions have caused problems or used deceptive practices or whatever, but it's also indisputable that they have positively changed the lives of thousands if not millions. Does all that positivity that make the Original Sin of foundational lies OK?

As a Christian, obviously, I don’t believe Jesus was a liar. As a non-Mormon and non-Scientologist, I believe Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard very much were. Such is the unavoidable dividing line between believers and skeptics. Faith often requires us to believe true that which is difficult to accept as true.

But with Greg Mortenson... at the very least he tells convenient half-truths, and he (er, his organization) mishandles more money in a month than most of us see in a year, and he gets his ego stroked by reporters, military generals, politicians, and untold thousands of Americans and poor foreigners.

Disclosure: This story hits very close to home.

Two years ago, a nearby school, a school my daughters will soon attend, put most of its focus on fundraising to help Mortenson’s organization build a school for girls in Afghanistan. They raised over $60,000. Mortenson even came to the school and spoke to them. Now there’s serious doubt the school was ever built, and even if it was, there’s doubt it’s being used as a school and not sitting empty or being used for storage.

When these students saw or were told about the 60 Minutes report, you can only imagine how devastated they were. Mortenson's defenders may be right in part -- we don’t know the extent of Mortenson’s deceptions and incompetencies -- but even the true believer must accept that he has overstated his accomplishments and understated his own profiteering. The most common defense: surely there are worse people out there for journalists to investigate.

Do the schools Mortenson actually built that have real girls in them excuse that he or his organization mishandled this school's $60,000, money raised for a specific purpose that was never met? If Bernie Madoff started a world-changing charitable foundation with the millions he bilked from unwitting investors, does that make him less of a thief?

I find myself fairly ripped apart by these questions. I don’t like having to ask them, and I don’t like the answers my heart and head offer back. Instead I think of The Watchmen, and about Serenity, and many great works of more traditional literature that suggest that large-scale lies and cover-ups in the name of the Greater Good are never, ever OK.

Times like these, I wish reality were as easy as fiction. Is our sin here in making a hero out of a human, or is the sin that the human insisted on believing too much of his own hype? Can we ever get far enough past our own miserable flaws to do truly heroic things for very long, or if we keep flying, are we destined to eventually find ourselves a little too close to the sun?

Can Spin Doctors Be Sued for Malpractice?

Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running) - Foo Fighters (mp3)
The Compromise - The Format (mp3)

I've long claimed that one of the reasons I lean more liberal than conservative is that, amongst the people I encounter in my life, the more liberal folks tend to be happier. The conservative folks tend to have as much if not more money, but they seem to be constantly complaining about things. America's morals are in decline, or the guv'ment's stealing and wasting their money, or the media's spinning lies.

At the end of the day, though, I have just as many conservative friends (and even more conservative relatives), and the difference in their politics rarely if ever gets in the way of us having a good time.

I rarely if ever use the word "hate" in a sincere manner, but at the moment, I hate politics. I hate that the most important people in the political sphere believe this is a game. I hate that they don't so much care if they contradict themselves, or if they sell their souls, so long as they win. I hate that this kind of wholesale sacrifice of honor and integrity seems to know no party lines. And I hate that it's only gonna get worse the closer we get to Election Day.

Regardless of your political affiliation, I dare you -- DARE YOU -- to watch this clip from Jon Stewart and not marvel at how these people sleep soundly at night. There is spin, and then there is Axis of Evil Shout at the Devil spin, where people will say whatever from one minute to the next so long as it might move them forward on the game board.



The "lipstick on a pig" drama of late is just another example. When Obama says it, it's sexism and an attack on Palin. When McCain said it months earlier, it was a comment about a health care plan and not the woman, Hillary Clinton.

If one of the Republican strategies is to make people like me despise all politicians and all of their aides and talking heads more and more with each passing day, then they are doing a damn fine job. While my examples are pointed at their ranks, I realize they are not alone in this shameless hypocrisy.

The realization that both sides play this heartbreaking game of talking from both sides of their mouth is hardly comforting, nor does it embolden my confidence in a better future.

"The Compromise" is from The Format's second album, Dog Problems, and they're one seriously worthwhile alterna-pop investment if you like this song. "Cheer Up, Boys" is from the latest album from the Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience + Grace. Both are available at iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.