A Short Missive on Deception

I just finished reading a book I picked up to keep me busy during the holiday, gods in Alabama. It was much better than I expected, with actual themes and symbolism and foreshadowing involved. I was just looking for a little brain candy to keep me busy for a few days, but I lucked out. Anyway, one of the themes of the book was different ways of being dishonest. The protagonist (fancy word, huh? You'd think I'd wasted 4 years of my life getting a degree in English or something...)....ahem. The protagonist for complex reasons involving rape and murder makes a promise to God that she will not tell a lie ever again, and she doesn't for ten years. Ever. Not once, does she tell a lie (not even "No, that dress doesn't make you look fat"). Instead she perfects the art of dishonesty by omission, by selective truth-telling, by careful wording. The author seems to be positing that in many ways a straight-forward lie is less deceptive and less hurtful than this deception by pointedly, cleverly, carefully not lying.

I don't know; that's a bit of a stretch for me, but...I do both--though I notice I engage in the dishonesty by selective truth-telling whenever I sense a risk of being caught. That way I can always fall back on the technical argument that I did not lie. Though that is the essence of it--I'm trying to get off on a technicality. And everyone hates someone who gets off on a technicality, probably more than someone who is proven guilty. Because everyone knows that the one that got off did the same thing as the one who was found guilty; it's just that the one that got off outsmarted us. So we hate him more than the other guy, even though they actually did the same thing, because he did it better.

Who knows, maybe that was Joshilyn Jackson's point when she wrote gods in Alabama--not that it is less deceptive and less hurtful to tell the straight-forward lie, but that if you're going to get the same result either way--dishonesty--that you might as well do it the straightforward way, because at least then people will hate you less.