Liar's blues

1972. My dad catching me by the ankle as I desperately scramble up the stairs in a vain attempt to escape the well-deserved spanking I was about to endure, him fresh home from a double shift in the stock room at Northwest Paper Company, having learned in the car ride home from the mill, from my mother, about how I’d lied about spilling a gallon of paint on the living room floor while using it as a step stool to get at the piggy bank my sister had hidden behind the ceramic elf on the mantle.

“This is going to hurt you more than it’s going to hurt me,” my dad lied.

“It wasn’t me!” as the wailing commenced. Lies drifting around on the floor like dust bunnies…

(Note: the word “Lied” and “Replied” are linguistically related, as if to suggest the “reply/replie” is simply a response to an original lie. The ie vs y ending, a simple variation in spelling/derivation.)

Lying, despite how handy it can be, is exponentially worse for the liar than the lied-to. Take it from a retired professional. In the short run, the advantage all goes to the liar, which is the insidious, addictive nature of the relationship between the liar, the lied-to and the lie itself.

But, at the risk of sounding like an apologist, the very real, very brutal, Rule-of-Nature reality is that lying, like any other sinning, inevitably torches the sinner.

More on the torching in a minute.

Meanwhile, no one likes to be on the lied-to end. Be it large or small, with dire, immediate consequence or red-faced annoyance, being thusly victimized is an explicit robbery of respect and evidence that the liar’s perception of the lied-to confers inferiority.

What they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em.

Which is a parenthetical way of saying:

They’re too weak/stupid/insensitive to appreciate the pain and complexities of the actual truth.

And, in cases of pathological lying:

…so, I’ll protect them from that complexity and pain…

And, in cases where the pathological crosses over to pure narcissism:

…and manage it for them.

It’s the managing it for them that ignites the torching. Because, while the lied-to is compelled to move on, often away, often wounded and tattooed cynical, sometimes forever — an admittedly less-than sunny scenario — the liar and his (it’s always a “his,” right?) lies inevitably conspire to destroy both the lie and the liar, the same way a tornado is inevitably designed to destroy itself — both wind and vortex — while the objects of its destruction are inevitably rebuilt, however painfully, imperfectly or incompletely.

For the lied-to, the pain is intense, bloody, visceral. And ultimately overcomeable.

For the liar, the pain is the numbness of the undead. Dementia. An inability to know or live in the world of the real, detached from the Truth, which, in the end, prevails as a matter of nature itself.

For the liars in your life—your personal or public or political liars: have zero patience. But have sorrow, if not mercy. For theirs is the realm of the dim and surreal, while the Truth, all aswirl, simply spins.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest Columnist of the Year in 2017, his latest book, “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News and at killingthedevil.com.