World Wide Web of Lies
Gemma asked me to help her fill out an application for a dating site. We got through the first question – NAME? Then ran into a brick wall – AGE? “I’m not going to tell everyone I’m 28, that’s practically antique,” she said. “I like guys who are about 24. They’re more fun.”
We hovered over the second box and she finally typed: 23. “Gemma, you can’t lie,” I said, and she threw up her shoulders: “Chloe, the point is to sound interesting. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.”
Is Gemma right? Has lying become normal, acceptable – like twerking, selling debt, Father Christmas? George Washington famously couldn’t tell a lie. Richard Nixon famously couldn’t tell the truth – and paid the price. Dial forward two decades and we have Bill Clinton fudging over his sexual peccadilloes, followed by the Bush-Blair duo sexing up dodgy documents to falsely show that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad carpet bombed; 200,000 dead. These things happen.
In George Washington’s age, telling the truth was normal and expected. Now, it isn’t. And the problem in a society where people sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth is that we never know if it is truth or lies coming out of people’s mouths at any given moment. When a politician tells us that growth is up and unemployment is down it has the same ring about it as being told Elvis is alive and living in Kansas.
Watch the next A-list star promoting his or her (lying is not gender specific) latest movie. They will say: When I got the script I couldn’t stop reading it. It was the best script I’d seen in ten years. I knew I had to get this film made. La dee dah. Every writer with a 99 cents book on Amazon is a best-selling author. Every toothpaste brand will give you the same Hollywood smile as the stars flogging their movies on chat shows. Every bank commercial is likely to cause severe vomiting.
When the politicians, bankers, pharmaceutical companies and broadcasters accused of phone hacking do on rare occasions get called up over supersize-lies, the fashion is to say: I’m sorry, a momentary lapse of reason and, no, I will not resign. I have a duty to remain in my (multi-million dollar) post and put things right. So common is this new lie on top of the old lies we don’t even give an existential shrug.
Like a fantasy novelist, Gemma completed the dating application and the last I heard she’s going out with a racing car driver aged 24, or so he says, or so she says he says. Not that I’m jealous with my model looks, best-selling novels and a blog described by Tony Blair as the best he’s read on the world wide web.
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