When we arrived at one of the First Night performances last Saturday, we were told there were no more seats – until the doorperson, remembering having turned us away from the previous performance, materialized two chairs from somewhere and invited us in.
Happy as I was to get out of the rain and watch the show, I refrained from pointing out that we had not been there two hours prior, and that he must have mistaken us for someone else.
In other words, I got in under false pretenses. I haven’t lost any sleep over this, though if the people we’d been mistaken for had shown up, we would have deprived them of seats that were rightfully theirs.
The show was dreadful, alas. One might therefore say I did our body doubles a favor, except, of course, I didn’t know the show would be dreadful when I grabbed the seats so there’s no getting around the fact that I behaved unethically.
I am not telling you this because it has led me to resolve to lie less in the new year. I don’t lie much and rarely tell whoppers. Like a lot of people, I suspect, my dishonesty mostly takes the form of not always saying what I’m thinking. That can be a good thing. But not always.
All in all, though, I don’t count mendacity among the major character flaws I need to work on.
I tell you about my seat grab on First Night by way of acknowledging, before I begin casting stones, that I am neither pure nor a purist when it comes to truth-telling.
But there are fibs, some justifiable, some not, and then there’s the epic dishonesty of George Santos, newly elected to Congress from a district on Long Island. Santos, we have belatedly learned, has falsified just about everything in his biography — his religious background, his academic background, his work history, his finances.
My favorite: When challenged about his religious affiliations, he claimed to have said he was Jew-ish, not Jewish – as in kinda-sorta Jewish, but not really.
Part of the reason the Santos story interests me is the Long Island angle – it’s where I spent my childhood. Part of the reason is journalistic. When The New York Times began exposing Santos’ lies – after the election – I thought it was another example of how the decline of local news hurts us all: In the good old days, a local paper would have brought the candidate’s fictions to light before the election, and the revelations would have nipped his political career in the bud.
It turns out, as the Washington Post reported last week, that the North Shore Leader did poke holes in some of Santos’ claims before the election. It was the big papers, notably Newsday and The Times, that failed to follow up until it was too late. Interesting twist.
But the main reason I’m fascinated by the Santos story is the scale and brazenness of the man’s fabrications. Embellishment, we can forgive. Withholding the truth also. I know I’m too old to be this naïve, but when I see someone looking us in the eye, as it were, and knowingly making claims that are grossly and demonstrably false, it floors me.
And I can’t help thinking that such next-level lying bespeaks a larger rot in our culture, “a growing political phenomenon of saying or doing anything, with no automatic consequences,” as Tom Suozzi, the previous occupant of Santos’ seat in Congress, put it in a New York Times guest essay.
There may have been a time when we valued “success with honor,” to use Joe Paterno’s formulation. But now, apparently, having wised up to how corrupt all our institutions are, we know that playing by the rules, being truthful, acting with integrity, is for chumps.
To use Bill Maher’s formulation, there are new rules, and rule number one is win by any means necessary. That rule allows you to break all the other rules. Thus our biggest winners are our biggest cheaters, our biggest liars, our biggest thieves.
Remember when news broke in 2020 that Donald Trump had been paying way less than you or I to the IRS? At last, I thought, the hardworking, tax-paying citizens who voted for him in 2016 will realize he was playing them for chumps.
Didn’t happen. Good for him! He beat the system. Maybe he’ll show us how to beat the system. Maybe he’ll dismantle the system.
He tried.
Maybe we’ve had enough lying. Maybe the dishonesty had to get this blatant for us to see success at all costs as the dead-end it is – the one-way ticket to Palookaville, that Marlon Brando’s character buys in “On the Waterfront.”
George Santos is expected to be sworn in as a member of the U.S. Congress. But he’s under investigation. He may yet get his one-way ticket to Palookaville. So might Donald Trump.
I’m not going to hold my breath. But during this first week of the new year, we can at least hope that we’ve hit bottom, ethically speaking, and honesty and integrity in public life will mean something again.
