To Tell The Truth
for release 01-19-06
Washington D.C.
In the mid seventies, a press agent in Dallas took an interest in me as a young poet. Jim Erwin had worked for Lyndon Johnson, John Connally and Willie Nelson and many other Texas pols and entertainers. He was an old-timer in the business and I was just an upstart. Within a month after meeting him I had gone from playing small bars and coffee houses in Dallas to playing my flute in the State Capitol Rotunda in Austin and my picture was on the front page of the Dallas Morning News.
I listened to Jim's advice. Why? Because he was a genius. Also because he knew every nook and cranny of his business. He was formally retired from the PR business, but he still knew everyone in the world. The work he did for me was strictly pro bono.
When he first decided to work in my behalf, he took me aside and said, "The only thing that a writer has is his credibility. Never, never, never, never ever lie to the press. If you make a reporter look bad by blowing his credibility, you are dead in the press. If you lie to them, number one, they will always discover it. And two, they will drop you like a hot rock when they do."
But Jim Erwin is dead now and so is his sense of ethical behavior regarding the press. He was from the old school. The old school has shattered into a million little pieces.
These days you are dead in the press unless you are an expert liar. Cite as an example, James Frey and his fanciful memoir A Million Little Pieces. It's the hottest piece of fiction masquerading as fact since the Castaneda books about Don Juan. Oprah endorsed it and, as was predictable, sales went through the roof.
When reporters, like the people from SmokingGun.com started digging into the facts, as reporters will do, they discovered that A Million Little Pieces was a work of the imagination rather than a journalistic account of events as it was presented. Memoirs fall into the category of non-fiction. This has always baffled me. Even truthful people are prone to lie when they are talking about themselves.
A Million Little Pieces was presented by its publishers as fact when it was largely fiction. But if you can get over on Oprah, you can get over on the world. The book has sold over 3.5 million copies. And fueled by the current controversy, it has gone into another printing. People are buying the book just to see what all the talk is about, it's as good for sales as being banned in Boston.
Of course hoaxes and fiction trying to present itself as fact is nothing new to the literary world. The Bible comes to mind and The Book of Mormon, the Urantia Book. Orson Welles' production of War of the Worlds as a live radio play is a good example. The radio program was not presented as news nor was it intended to deceive but it was so convincing that many people accepted it as real. Besides Castaneda's works, many other pieces of fiction have taken on a mantle of factuality. In the early 1980's someone tried to sell the world on a diary purportedly written by Adolf Hitler. My favorite is the Clifford Irving autobiography of Howard Hughes. It was a brilliant con.
We can read endless apocryphal accounts of history and miracles and redemption until the question becomes: Do the facts necessarily have anything to do with the Truth?
Does is matter if Don Juan ever existed in order for the truths that were expressed in the Castaneda books to be valid? Does it matter if Jesus ever really existed to make the truths in the New Testament valid? This is the same argument that Oprah used when she called in her endorsement of Frey's book on Larry King last week. She said that it didn't matter if the facts were in order because the narrative was powerful and moving (in that sobby Oprah way) and that people's lives were changed by it.
This is the same argument that BushCo is using to sell their failed war in Iraq--"It doesn't matter if we had our facts straight, all that matters is that people's lives were changed."
One of the hallmarks of good fiction is that it can make the reader believe he is in a real world. That's why my new literary heroes are Karl Rove and Andy Card and Dick Cheney and their little talking monkey, too. They made the whole country think that we are at war with a noun (terror). They put us in a world where Saddam Hussein is joined at the hip with Osama bin Laden and his evil terrorist organization. They convinced this nation to ignore the man behind the curtain. They write fiction better than James Frey.
But, in the end, I think my old mentor Jim Erwin's teachings will endure. Liars will always be found out, or more likely, they will betray themselves.
If you believe in magic don't bother to choose
If it's jug band music or rhythm and blues
Just go and listen it'll start with a smile
It won't wipe off your face no matter how hard you try
Your feet start tapping and you can't seem to find
How you got there, so just blow your mind
---John Sebastian
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