Lying for a Living

As a small child, I was a good girl and wasn’t consciously aware that I had anything to lie about. I was also fortunate that I did not come from a family buried in layers of secrecy. I don’t remember lying as a kid unless you count saying everything was fine when it wasn’t. That kind of misrepresentation was baked into childhood, indeed into all of middle class life. The first order of business was always to appear to be doing well. I didn’t know enough about how I felt to know I was lying if I withheld information. We all signed on to that obfuscation, the pretense that everything was AOK when sometimes it wasn’t. But specific intentional lies of the “It wasn’t me…. I didn’t do it…” variety didn’t arise until adolescence when suddenly we were betrayed by our bodies and discovered an entire continent of subjects best kept under wraps. Before that I was ignorant of the complex interweaving of truth and falsehood. I imagined that on a clear day I could see forever, that there were no shadows, no shades of gray.

Now all life is pixilated. When you stare at any one person or event, after a moment the image breaks up into microplastic, into an endless ballet of spin. Being lied to may be the most characteristic feature of modern life. Being stolen from is a close second. And here I am, still an innocent abroad, stunned by the universal assumption that no one is ever telling the truth, that to expect the truth is to demonstrate hopeless naivety. For example, what happened on April 5th?

Photo by Shalom de León on Unsplash

Depending on the algorithm or where you get your news, April 5th, 2025 was an occasion of mass protest or an ordinary early spring day, sunny in California where I have been since December, chilly but manageable at home back in Minnesota where I am headed tomorrow, cold and rainy in the Berkshires where I lived for fifty years and where waiting for spring is an annual ritual. If you read primarily the legacy media, you would not register the magnitude of this resistance action. On the 6th, The New York Times online feature The Morning led with a story about the onset of the baseball season. CNN’s coverage began with a report that “Scores of people took part in protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk across all 50 states and globally on Saturday…” Scores? Later, the word “millions” was used, but to begin with the word “scores” was noteworthy. Then, something that came up as @realDonaldTrump (is there even such a thing?) suggested that “Wow! The April 5th protests—FAKE! Totally STAGED! I’m hearing from VERY reliable sources (the BEST sources) that George Soros paid FIVE MILLION people—can you believe it??—$100 MILLION EACH to protest. Total scam. They’re not protesters—they’re 5 million actors!” Did he really post such a message in between directing ICE agents to scoop people up off the street without due process and sending the global economy into a death spiral? I’ve progressed to the point where I generally know when I’m being lied to but I still can’t be sure where the lie originates or how to defend against it. I’m reminded of my least favorite childhood game dodge ball where you stood in the middle of a circle and got bombarded from all sides.

I was moved by the images on Facebook of gatherings across the country, especially the ones in places like Salt Lake City and Mobile. But you have to be previously entrenched in anti-Trump America, the America of defiance, to encounter those images or to care about them. As it happens, I was unable to go to the rally in Sacramento, an hour from where I’ve been living in the rural, mostly red Sierra foothills. Instead, I attended a birthday party for a five year old boy. Along with a great many toy cars and trucks, the little boy, impish and charming, got a Crosman Legacy Variable Pump .177 Caliber Pellet/BB Air Rifle. And that’s the truth.

Watching or reading the news used to be what you did to maintain your identity as an informed citizen. That seems so straightforward now, such a luxury, a return to a time when truth-telling was a shared cultural and political value. We used to argue with the official count at protest demonstrations, but we were not put in the position of having to defend the fact that a demonstration had taken place, that the people in the street were not members of Actors’ Equity. Something malignant unfolds when there is no standard of truth-telling, when the other side lies for a living and we are still good girls being asked to disbelieve our own eyes.

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