I was walking from my car wearing my
favorite sweatshirt inside out, and a neighbor asked me, "Do you know your
sweatshirt is inside out?" I replied that I did know and that it — my
wearing the sweatshirt inside out — was intentional.
The sweatshirt says CALIFORNIA in
large letters and CALI MADE and "Cali
Life." It also shows a hand with an emerald, but I didn't know what
that might mean until I Googled for this blog post "California + Emerald"
and discovered it probably refers to "the Emerald Triangle": the area
covered by the northern California counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and
Trinity, known for cannabis production.
The reason I wore the sweatshirt
inside out was because "Cali Made" can mean "born in California,"
and I wasn't. I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, grew up in Chicago, spent
much of my young adulthood at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (except
for one year of apostasy at Cornell in upstate New York), and spent the bulk of
my life teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in Butler County in
Ohio's 8th Congressional District, going from The Land of Lincoln to
that of John Boehner.
And I currently live in Ventura
County, CA, some 500 miles from "the Emerald Triangle." (Although the
California Emerald Club is my local [medical] marijuana home-delivery service —
discounts to military personnel and seniors! — but I won't be using them until
marijuana is fully legal in California, or until my back issues get serious
enough that I need something to supplement acetaminophen and Tramadol; and even
then I don't think I'll want to advertise my dealers on my clothing.)
Anyway, it's a nice sweatshirt:
still black after several washings and the right size and soft — but "Cali
Made" would be a lie if it identified me as a native Californian, and I'm
not living the "Cali Life" if it involves regular marijuana use nor
buying clothes from the downscale Cali Life company or the upscale one. (I bought the sweatshirt
at Fallas Paredes, an all-American
store in the National Store chain out of Los Angeles, and one with some low-priced clothes in my
size because I'm a small man and so are a fair number of Mexican-Americans.)
I'll
wear "war surplus" military gear with the non-rank patches still on,
if I can't get them off without making holes, but that's pretty much it with me
for Untruth in Clothing. If I wear a university sweatshirt or cap, it's because
I attended the school or worked there or — minimally, in the past — because
someone who was associated with the school gave me the sweatshirt or cap.
Sometimes
I confuse people. For example, I had on an Illini cap and someone asked me if I
were an Illini fan. I feared an argument on appropriating an AmerIndian tribal
name, but it turns out that wasn't an issue, so I responded, "I'm not an
Illini fan; I'm an Illini." The next question/statement was the incredulous,
"You played football for Illinois?"— I was about 5'2" at the
time — and I said, "No, I've got two degrees from them. The school. There's
a university associated with the sports teams."
Sometimes
people confuse me, as when I paid too much for what I thought a painting a
neighbor said was hers but turned out to be a print she'd inherited. In the
context of what I assumed was an overflow area for paintings on display for
sale, I thought her painting meant
something she painted, not something she merely owned.
And
sometimes people annoy me, as did older boys in the Chicago 'burbs who wore
jackets that indicated they started for the Blackhawks, when they definitely
did not. Or the marketing crap epitomized in the possibly apocryphal story of
the restaurant that sold "Fresh Fruit Salad" made with canned fruit —
and explained that the name of the menu
item was "Fresh-Fruit Salad," which shouldn't be taken to mean that
it actually contained fruit that was fresh as opposed to canned. More
seriously, there was my actual, personal experience of receiving in the mail official
missives labeled bills, telling me I owed money, instructing me to pay the balance,
and threatening penalties if I didn't — when I owed them nothing because I was
on one form or another of Auto Pay. When I called to complain, I was told,
"Just ignore the bill (you can file it as a statement)." I asked the
plebian on the phone to send up the corporate food chain the mostly rhetorical
question, "Do you really want to tell your customers 'Just ignore the
bill'?"
"WORDS
MEAN" damn it!
And
that words — and symbols and some significant silences — mean in complex ways is all the more reason to be careful with them.
Consider
the stories of three young men, kind of Karmically balancing one another.
One
was a student of mine in the early-1970s, I think, who pronounced solemnly at
the close of one class, "A lie is worse than murder." I pointed out
that this was indeed the traditional gentleman's doctrine and said we'd discuss
it next class meeting. And then I went back to my office and spent an
inappropriate amount of time fantasizing about coming to class with a starting
pistol, holding it to the guy's head, saying "I'm going to blow your
brains out, punk" and asking the class what I should now do. If "A
lie is worse than murder," I should fire and murder the student rather
than having lied about my intentions. But this was back before open-carry laws
and stand-your-ground and the student might actually have been a gentleman —
and I don't think I had tenure — so I just presented the idea to the class as a
thought experiment.
My
student was right about the gentleman's code, Old Style: "Giving the
lie" to a gentleman was a challenge to a duel since calling him a liar was
an insult that could be erased only with blood. But outside of a code that was starting
to look silly in Shakespeare's day, "A lie is worse than murder" is nowadays
— since, say, the late 19th century — itself bullshit.
The
second young man is introduced in a story in The New York Times on line
with "Joel Pavelski, 27, isn’t the first person who has lied to his boss to
scam some time off work." This is followed by a significant But: "But inventing a friend’s
funeral, when in fact he was building a treehouse — then blogging and tweeting
about it to be sure everyone at the office noticed? That feels new." Mr.
Pavelski, his company's director of programming (which sounds like a job with
responsibility) got a week off — or as much time off as he needed — from a boss
sympathetic to the pain he supposed Mr. Pavelski was feeling over the death of
a friend. Pavelski's boss was surprised to come across a tweet directing
on-line folk to "a link to Medium, a popular blog for cathartic, personal
essays. In a post titled, 'How to Lose Your Mind and Build a Treehouse,' Mr.
Pavelski wrote about feeling burned out at work," plus the recent end of a
long love affair, a ten-year anniversary of what appears to be a brother's
death, his parents' impending divorce, and a friend's continuing emotional
problems — none mentioned in the Times article
— "and wanting to rebuild a childhood treehouse as therapy. The first line
read, 'I said that I was leaving town for a funeral, but I lied.'"
Except
Pavelski may have misled his boss but not exactly lied: If, but only if, his
story on Medium is generally true, "It turns out," he "did
come back for a funeral, of sorts."
Literally
highlighted (in green) on the Medium article is the line "It’s easy
to say someone died. It’s much harder to say, 'I think I’m having a nervous
breakdown.'" More exactly, as stated earlier in Pavelski's essay, "People
get visibly uncomfortable" when you tell them someone died. "They
clam up and offer condolences, and then pretend that you didn’t mention it at
all. They don’t ask any more questions." And Pavelski didn't want
questions then but did want them later: he posted the essay in Medium
and got the word out that it was there. He lived the cliché, "a cry for
help" or at least he got out an appeal for understanding, or published a confession.
Pavelski
and Ben Widdicombe, the author of the Times
story (the third, youngish
looking man), say a lot here about truth.
Pavelski
doesn't believe that "A lie is worse than murder" — which is wise on
his part — nor even worse than getting fired for admitting problems and looking
too weak to handle work-related and personal stress. Nor does he have
sufficient superstitious faith in the power of words that he'd avoid killing
off a friend, so to speak, by lying about a death: many of us would hesitate to
make up a death among family or friends because of a vestigial fear such words
could have magical consequences in the real world. And the Medium essay
is silent on the lie as a betrayal of Pavelski's own integrity or of his
relationship with his boss and colleagues — or a lie as pulling a thread or two
out of the social fabric, a figurative brick pulled from the foundation of
society and community, nor a very nonfigurative shifting of work to Pavelski's
associates while he gets his head together and a tree house built.
For
his part, Widdicombe oh-so-fastidiously provides a link to the Medium
essay, but in his text, under the logo of The New York Times, he omits enough to twist
the meaning of Pavelski's story to give himself an excellent opening sentence
and an easy example of the problems that arise "[…] When Millennials Run
the Workplace."
*
* *
There's
a spectrum from outright lies at the one extreme to the Internet Movie
Database's having you click "On Tonight" to find out what's on
television at 10 in the morning, from wearing a jacket saying you're a starter
for a professional hockey team to wearing a police uniform to make it easier to
pull off a hit. And there's distance on that spectrum between the flippant,
self-serving lies Ben Widdicombe suggests Joel Pavelski told, and the maneuvers
of the over-privileged but sympathetic character that comes through in Joel
Pavelski's Medium essay. I stated that carefully with "character that
comes through": we can't be sure whether the story told is mostly true to
Joel Pavelski's real-world story, with some modifications for narrative effectiveness,
in the tradition of the personal essay, or if it's very different from the
story of the actual human being, Joel Pavelski, following postmodern practice
in, say, the "On
the Rainy River" chapter in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
From
the most innocent to the most pernicious, however, all of these slippages from
the truth taken together are significant. Taken
together, they form the rich manure out of which can grow not so much
Donald Trump himself but "truthiness" and the tolerance for untruth
that lies near the center of Trumpism.
It's
no big deal if I wear a sweatshirt identifying me as CALI MADE; but it was easy
to turn the sweatshirt inside out when I put it on to sit down to finish this
blog post. It's no big deal if you wear a gift T-shirt that says "WORLDS
BEST GRANDPARENT" if you know you're not even close; but it's not an
article of clothing you should buy for yourself, not if you've got the time on
your hands and other resources to be reading blog posts and aren't desperate
for cheap clothing to cover your body.
A
lie is not worse than murder, but "Words Mean," and we should be
careful with our words. Even as we should kill other people only if we really,
really have to — and as less than a full-out pacifist I need to make a
statement like that; even so we should try to limit our lies to when we really,
really need to, and, as much as we can, communicate with truth.
"Tell
truth and shame the Devil" — or at least make it more difficult for the
Donald Trump's of this world to attain and hold dangerous power.
================================
Note
By Ben Widdicombe, 19 March, 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/fashion/millennials-mic-workplace.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0>
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