Everybody Lies
by James Ottavio Castagnera
“What’s the one statement a person can make that you can be certain is true?”
My lawyer friend Archie McAdoo and I were seated in front of his big-screen TV on a recent Saturday afternoon, sharing a six-pack of Guinness and watching a baseball game. The question caught me by surprise… but that’s Archie for you.
“You couldn’t have held that for the seventh-inning stretch?” I responded a little irritably.
“No clue, eh?” McAdoo smirked. “The answer is ‘I’m a liar.’ Want to know why?”
I sipped my Guinness and tried to ignore him, knowing I was about to learn why, no matter what my reply.
“See, either the speaker is telling the truth, because he is a liar. Or he’s lying now, which turns him into a liar.”
I watched a couple of pitches before admitting to McAdoo “That is kind of intriguing. You really think there’s no other statement a person can make that is totally reliable?
“In today’s America? Nah. Everybody lies.”
“In court?” I queried him.
“Especially in court,” he contended, his voice betraying a bit of bitterness now. “The oath only means something because a witness who takes it can—in theory at least—be prosecuted for perjury. But the fact is, almost every party to every lawsuit exaggerates, shades the truth, or has ‘no present recollection’ as suits their cases.”
I had been a lot happier immersed in the ballgame. But, now that Archie had opened the door, I had to admit, “Plagiarism has become a plague in higher education.”
My mind went back to the spring semester and I recounted how a student in my class — Famous American Trials of the 20th Century — had submitted a paper on the Clay Shaw trial involving the 1963 Kennedy assassination.
“She cited as one of her sources www.JFKinfo.com. I checked it out and discovered it was the Web site for New York’s JFK airport.”
Archie took a sip of brew and gave a throaty, wet chuckle. “I hear there are a lot of term-paper sites on the Internet,” he said.
“Amazingly,” I agreed, “many of them are even free. People are pooling essays by the thousands and allowing site visitors to download and use them for nothing.”
“How the hell do you police something like that?” he wondered.
“Ironically,” I replied, “it’s actually easier then it used to be.”
“How so?” He held out the blue corn chips. I grabbed one and scooped up some salsa.
“Well, there are a number of software programs that will vette student papers—provided you have your class turn in diskettes or submit e-mail attachments—for plagiarism. But the quick and dirty method is to type a suspect sentence in quotation marks and run it through a search on Google. If that sentence is anywhere on the Web, the Google search engine will locate it. Bingo… you got him. I found every source my JFKinfo girl used, and I found them in only fifteen minutes. Before the Internet became the main venue for academic ‘liar’s poker’ we had to go to the library and try to track down the books and articles a suspected plagiarist might have drawn upon.”
McAdoo pondered this as he drained a half bottle of Irish inspiration in one long pull. I knew something was coming.
“Wish we could Google the government,” he pronounced at last.
“That would be something,” I concurred.
“Yeh,” McAdoo looked toward the ceiling as if seeing a beatific vision… which following four bottles of his black elixir he may well have been. “What if the SEC and the employee-shareholders could have Googled the Enron financial reports before the company tanked? Think of all the people who would have saved their pensions and investment.” He was on a roll now.
“Sounds like you’re really talking about some sort of super lie detector. And they haven’t helped much in the criminal justice system, have they?” I asked, putting a sprag in his mental wheels.
“You’re right on,” he responded. “There is no absolutely reliable lie detector. And even if there were, the Fifth Amendment shield against self-incrimination, the assorted statutory and common law privacy rights, and the various privileges—attorney/client, doctor/patient, priest/penitent, husband/wife—all stand between the law and the truth.”
“Would you want it any other way?”
“Nah,” he replied without any hesitation. “I think lie detectors are just one step away from the torture chambers. There are still too many of those around, and the pictures out of Abu Ghraib prove that we Americans aren’t above stooping to those tactics. No, I don’t want to start down that slippery slope.”
“But, Arch, if everybody lies—business people, politicians, plagiarizing students—what’s the solution? Do we just grin and bear it? Become liars ourselves out of sheer self-defense?”
Archie studied the old-fashioned yellow and black label on the bottle of his Celtic muse.
“We—those of us who are dedicated to ‘truth telling’… to accurate reporting…to honest, scrupulous scholarship… to courtroom and boardroom ethics—are like the Irish monks of the Dark Ages.
“The Vikings are raiding our shores. The barbarians are at the gates. And all too many of our fellow citizens are throwing down their scythes and shepherd’s crooks and signing up to serve with the hordes.
“Like those beleaguered Medieval monks, we are the guardians of the truth.”
I studied my own bottle of brew. I patted the bald spot on the back of my head. And I said, “Amen, brother.”
