Handbook for Liars

By Luke Warm, D.M.

Professor of Mendacity, University of Munchausen

This is the first lecture in my series on the integrity of dishonesty.

As there is honor among thieves, so there should be upstandingness among liars.

Gresham’s Law applies to liars: Bad lies drive out good.

Good liars, you say? How can a liar be good?

Aha! A good liar is one who gets away with his or her lie.

That is what the art of lying is all about.

I ought to know — I’m a Doctor of Mendacity.

You know, like the Gilbert & Sullivan song, “There’s a Doctor of Mendacity, who resides in this Bombasity.”

Ha-ha! Even liars can be funny!

But this is serious: There are smart liars and dumb liars.

Today’s talk is about how NOT to be a dumbass liar.

Let’s say you’re some government official, or a business guy, makes no difference, you know someday you’re gonna have to talk to the press, and that’s gonna put you where everybody can see and hear you. Better sound earnest!

But you also know by the nature of your position, you’re gonna have to lie. You are undoubtedly doing something embarrassing or downright loathsome, and you know as an ongoing thing that the revelation of truth by you, speaking candidly, would minimally be an inconvenience and could lead to disaster, most often of the financial variety and occasionally of a nature that could terminate your life.

Hey, first of all, don’t feel bad about lying. Sure, it would be great to tell your grandkids you always told the truth, but you can still tell them that, even if it’s not true. Be a SMART liar!

See, dummies, this is all about non-verisimiltude. Faking it. Phonying up. Not little white lies. Big black lies. Bad black  lies. Socially unredeeming lies.

I’m sorry it takes a class to get this point across, but the good of your institution, whether business, government or crime syndicate if there is any difference, demands the lie.

But here are some things not to do when you lie, especially when lying to the press.

For example, if a reporter tells you something you know is so obviously true that any knothead could go see it, verify it beyond doubt, take its picture and publish the truth to the world, please don’t — please DO NOT!! — say it’s not so.

Denial of the flagrantly obvious is very, very stupid.

Want an example?

Let’s say you’re president of a company that owns an international bridge between the United States and Canada. We’re not going to mention the bridge by name in this lecture, but this bridge carries 40 percent of the freight between these two sovereign nations. And let’s say that the owner of this bridge is a mega-billionaire who thinks he too is a sovereign nation and can treat as an equal with Canada and the United States.

No fair guessing who this is! We’re going to leave the name of the bridge and the name of its owner synonymous. This is a class, not an expose. We  speak generically, not of specifics. We are academics, not pragmatics.

Now, let’s say that some news type confronts you with an obvious truth. You’ve been saying, let us say, that you put up fences on public property in the U.S. city where your span is based, basically stole city property. But you claim those fences are to provide “security” against “terrorists.” You’ve made a big deal about this and sent lawyers into court to make the false claim that there’s a big “security” problem.

And then some snot-nosed reporter comes up with a television camera and tells you that while you built a fence on the SOUTH side of your bridge, you didn’t bother to do the same on the NORTH side. You protected one side and not the other.

Fence on one side. No fence on the other side. Security here. No security there. This was succinctly reporter by Metro Times Editor Curt Guyette  with a video showing the naked north side of the bridge.

Because, knucklehead, the fact that there’s no fence and hence no security on the Canadian side of this bridge was reported on this blog almost a year ago. It was no secret, not even to bridge presidents. Not even to television reporters.

All this suggests that your claim of needing to protect the bridge is bogus, since you didn’t bother to do the same thing on the east side, which is in Canada, or on the north side in the U.S..

Basically calling you a liar.

And doggonit, the camera is running!

This is a toughie. What do you say?

DON’T SAY YOU DIDN’T KNOW THERE WAS NO FENCE ON THE WINDSOR–, I MEAN, ON THE CANADIAN SIDE, DUMBIE!

If you say that, it will make you look worse than a liar. It will make you look like a dope. This class is for wannabe liars. Dopes get a big fat F.

Denying it will only make you look like the clown and sycophant to the billionaire who pays you.

Getting caught in a lie is never as embarrassing as looking like a stooge.

So that is Lesson Number One from the Handbook for Liars: When a lie is yawning in front of you like a great big pool of shit, don’t jump in!

Lesson Number Two: If you do jump into a cesspool of mendacity, swim out as fast as you can, ask for a towel and claim you didn’t understand the question and were quoted out of context.

Don’t — repeat DO NOT!! — compound the lie by promising to “deal with that.”

That’s all for now from the Handbook for Liars.