Honesty

At the risk of sounding like the old fogey I'm becoming, I remember the days when honesty was considered a critical component of one's reputation and honor. [Aside to resident linguist: "honesty," "honor" - can there possibly be a connection?] In sophomore year of high school, I read Othello and remember the line by Cassio, having been set up by Iago:

Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!

A person builds a reputation for honesty necessarily over time. Its construction is simple: an honest person is one who no one remembers lying. The first lie instantly destroys the reputation. If you value honesty, you guard your reputation through your actions, no matter how difficult that task might be.

Being honest is not easy. There are a thousand ways to justify a lie or a deceipt, with many of these justifications being defensible - avoiding unnecessary hurt, or steering around unnecessary controversy being but two examples. Everyone knows this. But every deceipt chips away at one's reputation for honesty.

With this in mind (yes, it's always in mind) I read the account of Hillary Clinton's story of her 1996 trip to Bosnia with great interest. She needs to establish her much touted foreign policy bona fides (yes, I use the term deliberately), so she tells about her landing at the airport under sniper fire, how there was no greeting ceremony, and how she was told to keep her head down and hurry to the waiting vehicles.

This was demonstrably false.

So, how does this candidate for president apologize for her deception, a deception designed to show her in a heroic light, a lie coupled with the boast of how the Clinton White House would send the First Lady to places too small, too poor, too dangerous for the president to visit? She says she "misspoke," that she was human, that she was sleep deprived.

This from the woman who suggests only she can answer that 3AM phone call, that she is best prepared from day one to assume the office. Think about her words. How does one "misspeak" from prepared statements? How does lying in a purposeful manner make her human - once in a while, like everyone else - as she puts it? Why doesn't this sort of bold, bald faced lie not immediately disqualify her from consideration for the office she seeks? What this episode reveals, finally and conclusively, about her character is that she will say anything and dare the listener to do the research into the truth of what she says. She will lie willingly, seemingly instinctively, to further her goals. There is simply no recovering from this lie.

It used to be that the word of the president of the United States was considered to be the gold standard in honesty. I know that was ages ago in a world I barely entered as a youth before it was blasted away by LBJ and Richard Nixon, but have we so degraded ourselves that we just don't give a damn anymore? The coup de grace for honesty has been delivered over the past seven years by George Bush who has made the Big Lie, the constant lie, the tiny cascading lies part of government and political policy. But we now have a chance to do better, to change the language, to begin to recover our reputation.

Instead, we are still dealing with obscene, transparent, self-aggrandizing liars like Hillary Rodham Clinton.