August 24, 2001
If You Can't Lie
No Better Than That
Condit Ka-Chung
By David Vest
Congressman Gary Condit's woeful interview
with Connie Chung reminds us that it is now more than a century
since Oscar Wilde detected a "decay in the art of lying."
But Wilde, who might have saved himself with a lie he would
not tell, was born in Ireland, where standards are high and
a man who cannot tell a decent lie is reckoned of no account.
It took Condit 30 minutes to
do the interview. It took ABC 60 minutes to show it. It would
not have taken Oscar Wilde ten seconds to dispose of it.
How on earth did this man get
elected to Congress, of all places? Who could have thought this
poor bumbler worthy of the company of Trent Lott, Tom DeLay,
and Dick Armey? Why for Pete's sake would anyone who had not
had an affair with Chandra Levy need to go on national television
and refuse to say so?
Probably for the same reason
candidate George W. Bush refused to say whether he had ever
done cocaine.
Lying may well have decayed
by Wildean aesthetic standards, but today's lies are not the
work of dilettantes and minimalists. They are more like Mark
McGwire homers.
Anyway, even if it decayed
for a while, lying is definitely on the rebound.
When former Gov. Fob James
of Alabama declared, in June of 1997, that "No one has
a greater appreciation for a classical education as I do,"
one might have been tempted to call this lie the good governor's
greatest moment of truth, were it not for the fact that he also
said, "I didn't descend from an ape."
Georgia's Lester Maddox once
said, "If elected, I will disintegrate the schools."
That's almost as good as an
overweight chain-smoking man with the most dishonest-looking
face in America making a killing writing books about "virtue."
Or a millionaire athlete telling
us, "Personal records mean nothing to me. What matters
is the team."
Remember this one? "I
don't know what happened. I just snapped." Mike Tyson said
that during his "apology" for trying to bite Evander
Holyfield's ear off -- twice. It was repeated by countless men
in domestic violence court, virtually none of whom "snapped"
in the presence of the
judge.
In Hattiesburg, Mississippi
a couple of years back, a witness testified that to his knowledge
the Ku Klux Klan is a charitable organization that delivers
fruit baskets to the needy.
Rep. Condit could summon nothing
so memorable. He reminded
me of the car salesman in Fargo.
No. He reminded me of the late
Senator William Scott of Virginia, who once, after standing
on the banks of the Suez Canal and vowing never to give it back
to Panama, was voted "The Stupidest Member of the Senate"
by his colleagues.
Sen. Scott held a press conference
to announce that he had won the "recognition." It
was a lot like Rep. Condit's interview.
As Delbert McClinton says in
a pretty good song, "If you can't lie no better than that,
you might as well tell the truth." CP
http://www.mindspring.com/~dcqv/
|